The Joe-Mammy.com interview with Dr. James Kakalios
Ahhh, the internet. Some days I don’t know where I’d be without it. While scouring the wonderful series of tubes I ran across a snippet of a talk given by Dr. James Kakalios based on his book, “The Physics of Superheroes.” I checked out the other clips and was hooked. I picked up a copy of the book and found it to be just as fun and accessible as the clips I’d seen online.
Being the good little proactive webgodling that I am, I vowed to spread the word and see if I could the good doctor by for a little conversation. Thankfully he was agreeable and now you can bear witness to the Joe-Mammy.com interview with Dr. James Kakalios.
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Joe-Mammy.com: Let’s start with how you got involved both with science and comic books.
Dr James Kakalios: Well in my day job I’m a mild-mannered physics professor at the University of Minnesota. I read comic books as a kid but gave up the hobby in high school upon discovering girls—a discovery that I’m not given enough credit for in the scientific literature, but that’s a separate issue. Then when I was getting my PhD at University of Chicago I was waiting for the results of my candidacy exam. This is a major exam that Chicago makes all their graduate students go through. In physics it was an eighteen hour exam spread over three days followed by an hour and a half oral exam and as I was waiting for the results of this there was no question of my doing anything even marginally intellectual. I stopped in the card shop and they had an old style spinner rack—going for a retro feel “Hey Kids, Comics!”—and I thought “Wow, I haven’t seen these in years.” I picked up a whole bunch of them and looked at them.
Some weren’t so good and some were excellent. In particular, when I tell people who are into comics books now, one of the comics I picked up was an X-Men comic by Chris Claremont and John Byrne one of the early issues in the Dark Phoenix saga. People who are into comic books acknowledge that would be extra sweet crack to use to get rehooked. I just kind of fell back into the hobby as a way of relieving stress working on my dissertation more than anything else. Some of it like I say was really very good and a lot of fun.
At this point, of course I should point out that having abandoned the hobby back in high school and college my mother of course took that opportunity to throw my comic book collection away following the handbook that’s given to all mothers when they leave the maternity ward. So over the years I’ve kind of rebuilt some of my collection, but just to be safe I don’t let my mother anywhere near it. I’ve been reading comic books and collecting them and enjoying them. I don’t consider it a guilty pleasure simply because I don’t believe in guilty pleasures. You like what you like and there’s no reason to feel guilty about it, unless of course you golf, but that’s a separate issue.
What I’ve done at Minnesota teaching introductory physics over the years—this will probably come as a huge shock to you, but some of my students actually find physics dull, so what I’d do is bring in examples from “Star Wars” or television or comic books as a way to liven up the class and to break up the monotony. The students really seemed to enjoy it and so about five or six years ago the University of Minnesota started a new program called Freshman Seminars. These were classes for credit. They were real classes across the university, but they weren’t tied to any curriculum. They’re small seminar classes always taught by a faculty member and they encourage the professors to be creative and different. There’s one taught on the human genome and bioethics. There’s one taught through the chemistry department on the color red—all the different ways it makes occurs in nature and how it’s detected and just tracing through all the different types of chemistry associated with that. So I thought I’d try my hand at this and I created a class called “Everything I know about science I learned from reading comic books” where I took some of the examples I’d been using in my introductory physics class and took it as a challenge: could I build a whole physics class where there was not an incline plane or a pulley in sight, where all the examples would come from superhero comic books and as much as possible those cases where the superheroes would get their physics right.
It might come as a surprise to you but there’s actually a lot of correct physics and correct science in comic books. Certainly the super powers themselves are just impossible and I don’t see my job as being Professor Grump where I just go around and say “Well this could never happen. This is impossible. What’s the deal with the Hulk’s pants, anyway?” What we do is we grant each character a one time miracle exemption from the laws of nature and say well, if you did have super strength, if you could stretch like a rubber band, if you could run at super speed like the Flash or Dash from the movie “the Incredibles” could you run across the ocean or up the side of the building, catch bullets in mid-air, drag people behind you in your wake—all things that the Flash or Dash are shown doing, all things that are consistent with physics once you make this one suspension of disbelief. So we use them as the illustrative examples to get in with the physics and then I bring in practical applications from, with the Flash everything from Bernoulli’s Equation to conservation of energy when we analyze how much he’d have to eat to run at super speed. It’s a fun way of breaking down the barriers.
The traditional ways we have of teaching physics certainly work well for many students; they worked perfectly fine for me. But there are many other students that have this nervousness, this phobia, and they say “I want to know how an airbag saves lives but I’m a dummy and I’m not going to understand it.” And I’ve heard exactly this expression from professional journalists who are obviously extremely intelligent people who nevertheless are so nervous about their understanding of math and science that as you start to talk to them already the shields are up and they’re not quite getting what you’re saying. So instead of that, talk about the death of Spider-Man’s girlfriend and how she fell off a bridge and Spidey caught her in his webbing and discovered to his horror that she was dead and we can analyze this as a physics problem. This actually happened in a real comic; this was Amazing Spider-Man #121—classic issue, the death of Gwen Stacy. “The Day Gwen Stacy Died” I guess technically I’m enough of a nerd to specify that.
You can analyze this as a physics problem. When she falls off a bridge how fast is she going after she’s fallen nearly 300 feet? Turns out to be roughly about 95 miles per hour. How much force would his webbing have to supply to stop her in about half a second? Turns out to be nearly 10 G’s so it’s not unreasonable that her neck would break. Then we point out that this is why we have airbags in cars. When you’re going at 60 miles an hour and you hit something the car stops but you keep moving forward. This is Newton’s first law of motion: an object in motion remains in motion until acted upon by an outside force. That outside force is coming up in a moment. It used to be provided by the windshield or the steering column. The time is very short so the force had to be very large. Airbags do two things: they spread the force over a larger area and they deform under contact so that time available to slow you down is increased and so by increasing the time the force needed to slow you down can be reduced by a similar factor. The same physics that saves us in automobile crashes in our airbags tragically was not available to stop Gwen Stacy and thus led to her physically plausible demise.
Joe: When did your love of science develop?
JK: As a kid I really liked science. I don’t know where the came from. Maybe that came from being a nerdy comic book fan also. The comic books back in the 60’s when I was reading them, both Marvel and DC, a lot of times the heroes or the stars of the piece would be scientists. I remember reading “Legion of Superheroes” a comic book that is supposed to take place 1000 years in the future. By that point our society will have evolved to the stage where science is the governing principle. When there’s a crime you don’t call the police, you call the science police in the year 3000. The notion of the scientific method was glorified in these comic book stories. What do they do? They have they have a set of power of abilities. The villains have a different set of powers and abilities that can at least initially stymie them because otherwise there’s no story. If you’re Superman you’re not going to be working up a sweat over a guy with a gun. So there had to be something that would stymie you or slow you down and you have to basically outwit—you have to out think the villain. Even if you have no powers, you’re a Batman, you’re inevitably in a death trap or some sort of jam that requires you to out think or to reason your way out. Yes Dr. Doom had stolen the power of the Silver Surfer, but he forgot one key fact! (chuckles) They played very fair frequently in these stories and sometimes they employed scientific principles, but even if they didn’t it was the same principle. Here is the problem, here are what the constraints are, I have such-and-such superpowers, I have so-and-so weakness. How do I stop this villain and save the innocent bystanders without cheating—without suddenly showing heat vision when my power is just super speed.
That’s what we do in the lab all the time. We have a set of rules. They turn out to be electromagnetism and quantum mechanics. How do we solve today’s problem: trying to understand what this disordered semi-conductor material is doing? Applying the known rules, we’re not allowed to cheat. We’re not allowed to say “Well in order to explain this the electron has to split into three different parts and recombine later on.” No, electrons don’t do that. If that’s the only way I can solve the problem I have to think harder about it. It’s the same principles, the same creative problem solving, critical thinking that the comic books—at least when I was a kid—glorified that I wind up using practically everyday in my day job. To some extent it was a great entree into that.
If you go to these comic book conventions and you will find many of the comic book fans fall into two camps. Either they’re into the artistic endeavors and they were drawn to it from that point of view or you find people in high-tech fields and they were drawn to it I think by the content from what was going on in the stories.
That’s how I think that even as a kid I kinda saw science as a field. Then in high school I also kind of drifted away from it. I thought at one point I wasn’t smart enough. I thought I’d go into pre-law which was another way of saying I didn’t know what I wanted to do just yet. I liked to read and I was quick with the lip so I thought well, maybe law. I actually had an 11th grade trigonometry teacher who thought I was pretty good at math and he suggested patent law. From then I looked into the type of engineering classes and science classes you take in college and before you knew it I started life as an engineering major. And then I volunteered my freshman year to work at the physics lab for free, initially to get a summer research position that paid all of $300 for the whole summer—shows you how old I am. My colleagues now are willing to double it and give me $600 to change out but I don’ think it’s going to work. It’s too late.
Joe: To tell you how this world works, I actually ran across some clips of lecture you did on YouTube. I thought it was great and wanted to get you by the site. I actually showed the clips to my dad who’s a math prof and he just ate it up.
JK: Good, good, I’m glad. The thing is we talk an awful lot about doing outreach. I’m actually working on a grant proposal just today and one of the things you have to do is talk about what the broader impact of your work will be and in particular they like to see what kind outreach you’re going to do: how you’re going to try and communicate your results to the general public who are, after all, the people paying for this at some level. There’s a lot of benefits to the work we do—just training graduate students and teaching them how to be research scientists, otherwise you can just see society five years from now after some other demand will come up and they’ll say “We need more scientists and engineers.” Well you should have thought about that 5, 10 years ago when you were cutting everyone’s funding.
The other thing we need to do a better job of is communicating what we do to the general public. We live in an increasingly technological age and the knowledge of science has never been more important than it is today. The people at these conventions, the students in my classes, they may not all be scientists or engineers but they’re all citizens; they’re all going to be voters. The more you know the less inclined you are to be taken in by some technical sounding argument that’s technically unsound. Rather than just curse the darkness I’d like to light a few candles as far as that’s concerned. And if superheroes can help make the medicine to go down smoother—hiding it in a superhero ice cream sundae to get people to sneakily eat their spinach at the same time. Well, it certainly wouldn’t be the first time these heroes have saved the day.
Joe: How has the response been? It struck me as unusual because it seemed as something that was able to attract its own fan base—the people were already out there and they were able to connect with it easily.
JK: Right. The thing that’s worked—people actually had to look into it or see what I’m talking about to fully get it because there’s been plenty of books that do “The Physics of…” you know, pop-cultural phenomenon, and it’s not really that because I’m not trying to explain how Superman does what he does because it’s clearly physically impossible. So what I’d like to do is use these guys to explain the physics and to do it in what I hope is a fun and accessible way. The response has been very, very strong. It’s not New York Times Bestseller strong but the book has sold very well. It’s kind of funny because it was doing better in April than it did in October when it first came out and now it’s out in paperback. I still get tons of requests for talks and in fact I did more talks in April than when the book was first released and large audiences and very often not the people who traditionally come to physics talks. Though I have to say that as physics talks go I have many more scans of comic book pages and clips from Hollywood movies than the standard physics lecture. People get it. They respond and they enjoy it. You explain a little quantum mechanics, you explain a little bit about how air bags work. They appreciate this and you make it seem that we’re not just in this ivory tower and nothing that we do has anything to do with them. And I also make the connection how basic research and just trying to understand how atoms interacted with light back in the mid-1920’s by a handful of people led to quantum mechanics which a generation later led to the transistor and laser and a generation later led to DVD’s, iPods, cell phones, laptop computers—pretty much everything without which my teenage children would find life not worth living. The guys who laid the foundation for this were not trying to make CD players but without a basic understanding of how the world works our current lifestyle would be profoundly different. It’s doing these things, letting the curiosity drive the work, not worrying initially what is it good for because you don’t know what it’s going to be good for. But it’s also part of what we are about. It’s our only superpower—our intelligence. We just don’t want disarm unilaterally (laughs) because the forces of evil are out there waiting.
The response has been really great. For every person who writes in and says “Oh, I found an error”—which I don’t mind either because it means they’re reading the stuff very closely—are so many other people who really just dig it and enjoy it and it’s very, very gratifying. Because I can talk to my colleagues and do the traditional kind of stuff—and I do all that and it’s all very satisfying as well, but it’s also nice to make connections to people we don’t usually see.
Joe: It’s funny because my dad’s area is math and my area was history. He liked one aspect of the book and I was taken with just the amount of background you had there. You followed the history of science and technology and then cross-referenced it with the history of comic books and how they developed. It just seemed to like a tremendous undertaking.
JK: Yeah. (laughs) Good thing I didn’t realize how tremendous it when I signed the contract to write the book. But you know that was also the really fun part of writing the book. I have to say that while there were sometimes, there were some parts, that were a little bit of a chore, and I think in anything that will always be the case, a lot of it was I just enjoyed the physical process of writing it because every day was creative problem solving: how do I write this in a non-technical way that can be understood by someone who doesn’t have an advance degree in math or science and is engaging and tie it into an adventure that Ant-Man had or something like that. And that was partly why I focused on the comics I did because I had to basically go with the stuff that I knew and I had the freedom of being able to cherry pick over 60+ years. I didn’t have to worry about those cases where they were doing something that clearly violated every known principle of science and could just yank out those scenes that worked and explained what I wanted to explain. And then trying to cover everything was the challenge also because at first I thought I’d just hit this topic and that topic. Then as it progressed I thought I was able to fill in more of the blanks and then I tired to see if I could cover everything in one go. That was also an interesting and fun challenge. No one has really recognized it as such, but I really feel it was a bit of scholarship involved in trying to pull this all together and pull this from a different point of view, basically recasting introductory physics in an entirely different way so that you’re not allowed to use any examples that don’t come from this one source. It was fun, but it was indeed a lot of work. I give a lot of thanks to my family and kids who let their own grades suffer because dad wasn’t available to help them with their homework because he’s busy trying to help the rest of the world with their homework. Now it’s like “Okay, now back to your family.”
Joe: How long was the total process?
JK: Let’s see, I agreed to write the book in spring of 2003 and I pretty much delivered the manuscript initially of fall 2004. Maybe spring 2005, I can’t remember now exactly. It took basically about a year and a half. I already had a couple of chapters written and the book definitely expanded as the project went on and was longer than even the publisher thought it was going to be. I didn’t know if I was ever going to get another chance at this so let me see if I can just get it done in one rather than make it part of a series or anything like that. It took about 1 ½ to 2 years, going over galleys and everything else was a stressful process.
Joe: Editing is always so much fun
JK: (laughs) Well here it was triple checking all the numbers and everything else and even then stuff slipped through. Some things fell through at the publisher’s end and we had to fix in the paperback, but that’s just the nature of the beast.
Joe: One thing that really impressed me, and I think you alluded to a little bit as far as intent, was that it flowed very well.
JK: Thank you. That’s also the challenge, to maintain the same kind of tone and breeziness throughout. Yeah, it was challenging but it was fun. I really enjoyed it if nothing, else it got me to stretch a different part of those muscles that don’t usually get used. E.O. Wilson, a professor at Harvard, once said the perfect poet thinks like a poet, works like a poet, writes like a poet. The ideal scientist thinks like a poet, works like a clerk and writes like a journalist. You have to have this very creative way of approaching things when you think about your problems. You have to work very methodically and very systematically, you can’t be loose and fuzzy as you take your data. And when you write it up you have to be “just the facts, ma’am,” and there’s a certain style for the physics journals and science journals that doesn’t allow for wisecracks or things like that. So it was kind of fun to get that aspect, to be able to indulge that part.
Joe: I remember a few times the text was okay and then there’s this footnote that made me laugh out loud. It was fun to have thrown in there just keep everything loose.
JK: Yeah, that’s exactly right. There are some parts of it that I think worked okay and of course it’s a very personal issue. Some people have thought it was cute, there were parts of the book that were very humorous. A couple of reviews have referred to my “groan out load” “with a penchant for bad, truly bad jokes” I think was the Kirkus review. I understand that. Humor is a very idiosyncratic thing and what works for one person won’t work for others.
Joe: Just the form of it—I’ve done my share of reading academic literature and half the time these footnotes are these long drawn out explanations and then yours has these great little one-liners. I guess it just appealed to my subversive side.
JK: There was actually one part where it didn’t work out too well as the book was going along. One version my editor would put other little comments or footnotes. My editor was named Brendan Cahill and so he would sign these things “Bashful Brendan” or “Boastful Brendan” just the way Stan Lee would go “Smilin’ Stan”. I would have had to take time to explain who this Brendan was to the reader so it didn’t make it into the final version. But the first time he did that it made me laugh out loud.
Joe: Now from what I gathered you’re more on the research/experimental end of things?
JK: Right.
Joe: For me it’s fun to see people getting out to see a lecture series like that. In my experience the research guys tend to be in their own little world. They’re really interesting people, but they don’t necessarily relate as well sometimes, or at least there’s that stigma.
JK: Yeah, Sidney Harris is a cartoonist who does cartoons about math and science stuff. He’s the one who had the famous cartoon that showed these guys working a calculation on the blackboard and there’s this gap that says “And then a miracle occurs” and the other scientists says “I think you need to be more explicit in this step.”
He’s got one that shows the traditional white hair, wild hair, Einstein hair, lab coat scientist in front of a chalkboard covered in equations in a very mathematical way. And some reporters are there saying “Can you explain in layman’s terms what your breakthrough means?” And the scientist says “By all means, delta k is greater than t squared divided by g gamma factor…” And that’s exactly right, put this in layman’s terms and you say only if your layman has an advanced degree in astrophysics does that really help me any.
The thing is, one of the things that helped me was my wife; I met her at the University of Chicago when she was getting her advance degree in English. She’s not a scientist nor is she a comic book fan at all. She’s been extremely tolerant of this habit, more than I would have ever thought. She would read the early drafts and so she was great as my benchmark. I thought here’s an intelligent person but she doesn’t have a math or science background and if anything if you ask her she will tell you “Oh I don’t get this, this stuff is hard to understand.” I said if I can explain it to Therese, to my wife, then that’s my audience. I had the benefit of getting feedback from this person who represented who I was trying to reach. She gave me really helpful suggestions and “this isn’t working” or “I don’t get what you’re saying here” or sometimes “I like this” or sometimes she’d say “I know exactly what you’re saying” and she’d summarize it and I’d say “Nope, that’s not what I wanted to say,” so obviously I’m not getting it across, because if I’m saying something in a clear and accessible way, the wrong thing is getting through. That was great.
Brendan my editor at Gotham Books was also great in helping restructure the book. I was initially doing it in such a way my agent looked at it and said “This is really nice, it looks like a calculus textbook,”—helping me make it so that people would want to pick it up. Brendan suggested breaking up the chapters. Initially I think I had two long chapters and that was it. I realized that every time I had a new idea that it should be its own separate chapter. That made them all bite-sized nuggets that people wouldn’t fear—“Oh I can get into this, if I’m not getting what he’s saying it’s only one chapter and I’m out and it’s only five or ten pages.” Even so now there are times I look at it and I say “Oh I could said this better,” or “this is too wordy,” but I’m sure every author feels this way.
Joe: Did you have any plans for the next project or was this a one shot deal?
JK: I’m still kinda thinking about it. Because I enjoyed the actual process of writing if I can carve some time to work on it I have ideas for not necessarily a sequel but something that would carry on maybe the graduate level. (laughs) Or something explaining more the science behind everyday objects, but tying it into my geeky pop culture things. One of the things I kinda liked that came through the book based on reader comments as I’m sure was clear just from my beginning discussions in this interview, you know I’m a comic fan. One of the things that’s been really great is now I’m starting to get invited to comic book conventions as a guest. These are the same meetings that I went to as a fan, as an attendee. Now I’m sitting on the other side of the table and that’s really fun. At a comic book convention we have in the Twin Cities here called FallCon, you’re at a table and people bring up books to sign and sometimes come by and there are people who’ll ask me questions. They’ll just sit there or stand there and pepper me with questions not really about my field of expertise even, but you know about black holes, the expansion of the universe. One guy just said “Boy this is so great to have access to a physics professor.” It’s kind of like the same thing I would feel if I had access to a lawyer and could just pepper him with the questions that come to you while you’re shaving, things like that. That to me has really been the great thing.
Unfortunately there is some truth to the stereotype of an ivory tower in the sense that we come into work, we deal with students, we deal with our graduate students and we deal with other scientists and that’s all great and that’s fine, but there are a lot of people out there who won’t set foot on a college campus and when they see a little bit of the science they glow like there’s lanterns inside of them. Part of it is I enjoy comics and I’m a comic book fan but really I also have the physics and it’s not easy to write a good book when you have a great product. (laughs) To my mind it’s just so much fun to realize that there are these simple concepts that underlie how the world works. Part of the problem I think with how we teach regular physics is students think it only works in the classroom or the in laboratory and it definitely only works in the metric system. To see that it really is in the world around us and that we would not be able to enjoy the lifestyles we have today without people really trying to get this right, trying to understand how the world works and that we’ve been successful at it. If you just go back a couple hundred years and look what our lifestyle was like compared to today and there’s only one real reason. It’s just because of the scientific effort and the scientific enterprise. Nothing else; there hasn’t been any other change in politics or anything that could explain why now we can have transcontinental flights and cell phones and laptops. I just feel really very lucky and fortunate that I get to do this for a living and then I’m doubly lucky that I get to share with other people the pleasure that comes with seeing how the world works. It’s been a great experience. It’s been a great experience. If I can find the right venue and the right project sure I’d like to continue on because as with any professor, give me a simple question and I’ll give you a lecture.
Joe: Any words of advice for the kids at home?
JK: Yeah. Keep reading whether it’s comic books or Harry Potter or popular science books, but that spirit of investigation, that spirit of enterprise and critical thinking, boy we’re going to need you in the future. Like I said in the book. When I do traditional physics people always complain “When am I going to use this in my real life?” Whenever I use superheroes people never wonder when they’re going to use this in their real life. Apparently the kids today all have plans after graduation that involve spandex and patrolling the city. And so all I have to say is please, use your powers for good and not for evil!
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You can check out the website for the book at www.physicsofsuperheroes.com for news and updates. You can also drop by the Joe-Mammy.com Shop to pick up a copy of your very own. Physics classes are available at a local high school or college near you.
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What I’ve done at Minnesota teaching introductory physics over the years—this will probably come as a huge shock to you, but some of my students actually find physics dull, so what I’d do is bring in examples from “Star Wars” or television or comic books as a way to liven up the class and to break up the monotony. The students really seemed to enjoy it and so about five or six years ago the University of Minnesota started a new program called Freshman Seminars. These were classes for credit. They were real classes across the university, but they weren’t tied to any curriculum. They’re small seminar classes always taught by a faculty member and they encourage the professors to be creative and different. There’s one taught on the human genome and bioethics. There’s one taught through the chemistry department on the color red—all the different ways it makes occurs in nature and how it’s detected and just tracing through all the different types of chemistry associated with that. So I thought I’d try my hand at this and I created a class called “Everything I know about science I learned from reading comic books” where I took some of the examples I’d been using in my introductory physics class and took it as a challenge: could I build a whole physics class where there was not an incline plane or a pulley in sight, where all the examples would come from superhero comic books and as much as possible those cases where the superheroes would get their physics right.