Skip to main content

Totally Random - Tanya Bub and Jeffrey Bub **

It's difficult to decide just where the problems start with Totally Random. It's an attempt to communicate the oddities of quantum entanglement using a comic book format. There has already been an attempt to do this for quantum theory in general - Mysteries of the Quantum Universe, which managed to both have a bit of a storyline and get in a fair amount of quantum physics. Unfortunately the format also got in the way - so much space was taken up by the pictures that the words simply didn't manage to get the message across. Doubly unfortunately, this is also true of Totally Random, with the added negatives that it has no discernible storyline and it's rarely even visually interesting.

 The attempt to explain entanglement suffers hugely because Tanya and Jeffrey Bub decided to use a set of analogies for quantum entanglement ('quoins', a kind of magic toaster device that entangles them, various strange devices to undertake other quantum operations) that don't so much help understand what's going on, as totally obscure what's supposed to be put across. It's a bit like trying to explain the rules of football using a box of kittens. It's far clearer if you get rid of the kittens and just explain the rules.

 Visually, the cartoon style varies considerably. There are quite a few pages that contain nothing more than a shaded background with a series of frames each having a line of text in it. It's just a dialogue where each character's words sit in a different frame - the comic format adds nothing to what is, often, a series of mutual insults, providing particularly 'you had to have been there' humour. My favourite parts of the visuals by a long way are the odd pages introducing a section where actual papers, such as the EPR paper are portrayed in realistic form. Those do look rather cool.

 Most of the key characters of the quantum story turn up in cartoon format. We meet Schrödinger, Heisenberg, Bohr, Pauli, Bohm, Einstein - plus one or two more tangential individuals such as Everett. There are a lot of 'insider jokes' in these sections, where, for example, Einstein produces in conversation many of his better lines on quantum theory from his letters to Max Born. Unfortunately, unless you know the topic already, these in-jokes will mean very little and produce strangely stilted dialogue.

 I think that summarises the real issue with Totally Random. It's very much an in-joke for insiders. It doesn't explain entanglement: to the general reader, it obscures it with a pile of baggage that you have to have been there to understand. And even then it can be hard work. I'm fairly confident in my understanding of entanglement - I have a physics degree and I've read lots about it - but there were pages here I struggled to follow.

 Sadly, the main feeling while reading Totally Random was tedium. With other graphic novel/comic presentations of non-fiction I've read, it has all been over far too quickly. Here I was thinking 'When will it end?' I was not inspired, but, rather, bored (or to sink to the level of the humour here, Bohred). It's a clever notion, but unfortunately the authors seem to be entirely the wrong people to make it work successfully.

Paperback:  

Kindle:  
Using these links earns us commission at no cost to you

 
Review by Brian Clegg
Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Phenomena - Camille Juzeau and the Shelf Studio ****

I am always a bit suspicious of books that are highly illustrated or claim to cover 'almost everything' - and in one sense this is clearly hyperbole. But I enjoyed Phenomena far more than I thought I would. The idea is to cover 125 topics with infographics. On the internet these tend to be long pages with lots of numbers and supposedly interesting factoids. Thankfully, here the term is used in a more eclectic fashion. Each topic gets a large (circa A4) page (a few get two) with a couple of paragraphs of text and a chunky graphic. Sometimes these do consist of many small parts - for example 'the limits of the human body' features nine graphs - three on sporting achievements, three on biometrics (e.g. height by date of birth) and three rather random items (GNP per person, agricultural yields of various crops and consumption of coal). Others have a single illustration, such as a map of the sewers of Paris. (Because, why wouldn't you want to see that?) Just those two s...
Post a Comment
Read more

The Bright Side - Sumit Paul-Choudhury ***

When I first saw The Bright Side (the subtitle doesn't help), I was worried it was a self-help manual, a format that rarely contains good science. In reality, Sumit Paul-Choudhury does not give us a checklist for becoming an optimist or anything similar - and there is a fair amount of science content. But to be honest, I didn't get on very well with this book. What Paul-Choudhury sets out to do is to both identify what optimism is and to assess its place in a world where we are beset with big problems such as climate change (which he goes into in some detail) that some activists position as an existential threat. This is all done in a friendly, approachable fashion. In that sense it's a classic pop-psychology title. For me, Paul-Choudhury certainly has it right about the lack of logic of extreme doom-mongers, such as Extinction Rebellion and teenage climate protestors, and his assessment of the nature of optimism seems very reasonable, if presented at a fairly overview leve...
Post a Comment
Read more

Rakhat-Bi Abdyssagin Five Way Interview

Rakhat-Bi Abdyssagin (born in 1999) is a distinguished composer, concert pianist, music theorist and researcher. Three of his piano CDs have been released in Germany. He started his undergraduate degree at the age of 13 in Kazakhstan, and having completed three musical doctorates in prominent Italian music institutions at the age of 20, he has mastered advanced composition techniques. In 2024 he completed a PhD in music at the University of St Andrews / Royal Conservatoire of Scotland (researching timbre-texture co-ordinate in avant- garde music), and was awarded The Silver Medal of The Worshipful Company of Musicians, London. He has held visiting affiliations at the Universities of Oxford, Cambridge and UCL, and has been lecturing and giving talks internationally since the age of 13. His latest book is Quantum Mechanics and Avant Garde Music . What links quantum physics and avant-garde music? The entire book is devoted to this question. To put it briefly, there are many different link...
Post a Comment
Read more