Ray Monk

A graphic novel about logic? The idea is not as far-fetched, or as innovative, as one might think. Back in the 1970s, the publishing company Writers and Readers began producing a series of comic books (as they were then called) which sought to provide entertaining and instructive introductions, both to individual philosophers (Marx for Beginners, Wittgenstein for Beginners) and to intellectual movements and disciplines (Postmodernism for Beginners, Economics for Beginners). The series was extremely successful and many of these books are still in print. Like those earlier books, Logicomix is written with the earnest intention to make an important but difficult body of work accessible to ordinary readers and a conviction that the way to do that is through comic-book art.

‘Einstein’s personality, for no clear reason, triggers outbursts of a kind of mass hysteria,’ wrote a puzzled German consul to his superiors in Berlin during Einstein’s visit to America in 1930. Wherever Einstein appeared, the consul observed ruefully, he attracted huge audiences who were not just enthusiastic but positively worshipful. Overwrought admirers crowded round him, wanting to kiss his hand, touch his clothes, or just gaze into his eyes. The hysteria continued after his death, his relics preserved and treasured as if he were a medieval saint. His eyes, for example, are kept in a safe-deposit box in New Jersey.

Jeremy Bernstein is extraordinarily, perhaps uniquely, well qualified to write a biography of Robert Oppenheimer that is both authoritative and extremely readable. In the first place, he is himself an eminent physicist, a professor for nearly 40 years and the author of some 50 technical papers. In the second place, he is an exceptionally gifted writer, the author of several popular books (some on physics, some on physicists and some, believe it or not, on mountain climbing) and a regular contributor to the New Yorker. Finally, he has the advantage of having known Oppenheimer personally and of counting among his friends some of the people who knew and understood Oppenheimer best. If anyone can shed light on the enigma that is Robert Oppenheimer it is Jeremy Bernstein.

‘I do really feel it would have been a better world without Teller… I think he is an enemy of humanity.’ With this uncompromising assessment of his fellow physicist, the Nobel laureate Isidor Rabi expressed a view that has found many an echo throughout the last five decades. There are several reasons to regard Edward Teller as, in Rabi’s words, ‘a danger to all that is important’.

‘SCIENCE’S GREATEST DISCOVERY.’ So ran the front-page headline of the Reynolds’ Illustrated News on 1 May, 1932, the article underneath reporting that: ‘A dream of scientists has been realised. The atom has been split, and the limitless energy thus released may transform civilisation.’ The Sunday Express struck a more sombre note: ‘The Atom Split. But World Still Safe.’ For a few days after this announcement, the two scientists responsible for the breakthrough, John Cockcroft and Ernest Walton, were besieged by journalists and photographers and became rather reluctant celebrities.

When Michael Frayn wrote Copenhagen, he could surely scarcely have imagined the interest it would generate and the furore it would cause. A play that consists almost entirely of erudite conversations between two eminent physicists (Niels Bohr and Werner Heisenberg) about the development of quantum theory and the moral responsibilities of nuclear scientists is not obviously a crowd-puller. And yet, five years after its première, the play is still being performed and is still the subject of hotly contested academic debates at conferences throughout the world.

'Truth of fact and truth of fiction are incompatible,' Virginia Woolf once wrote. She was deploring the decision of her friend, Lytton Strachey, to combine fact and fiction in his book, Elizabeth and Essex, in which, in order to fill in the gaps in the historical record, Strachey used his imagination to invent details of the relationship between the Virgin Queen and her favourite earl. The result, according to Woolf, was neither an honest piece of biography, nor a satisfying work of fiction, but something that was caught in between the conflicting demands of the two genres. Elizabeth and Essex was published as a work of non-fiction.