Comic book fusion, Nathan Myhrvold on innovation, and picking winners of the Global Physics Photowalk

Comic book physics. (Courtesy: PPPL)

By Hamish Johnston

The comic book artist Frank Espinosa and Princeton University’s Sajan Saini have joined forces to create a comic book called A Star For Us. The book begins with a brief history of our understanding of nuclear fusion in the Sun and goes on to chronicle the challenges of creating a mini-Sun here on Earth.

Espinosa and Saini – who is a physicist turned professor of writing – spent time with physicists at the Princeton Plasma Physics Laboratory. Espinosa says that he was impressed by the researchers enthusiasm for the future of fusion energy. “I was trying to channel that energy of hope,” he explains.

“The mood of the comic tries to really capture a sense of a vast cosmic scale being made palpable, being made into something that we can realize within our own hands,” says Saini. I agree and you can judge for yourself by downloading a PDF of the comic book free of charge.

The physicist and former chief technology officer at Microsoft, Nathan Myhrvold, has a nice essay in Scientific American about the roles of the private and public sectors in driving technological innovation. He explains that when Microsoft Research was created in 1991, the company was keen on not making the same mistakes as AT&T, IBM and Xerox – which were all in the process of winding down their world-famous research labs. The problem was that these firms funded research in areas that they were not immediately able to exploit commercially. Myhrvold points out that many of the technologies first developed in those labs – including the transistor and giant magnetoresistance data storage – made much more money for fast-moving competitors such as Microsoft than they did for the companies that did the basic research.

“We were very clear at Microsoft that basic research was not our mission,” he explains, adding “Those who believe that profit-driven companies will altruistically pay for basic science that has wide-ranging benefits – but mostly to others, and not for a generation – are naive.”

Myhrvold goes on to explain why technological innovation is a process of both competition and communication and why governments must act to ensure that the rules governing these two processes are fair to all. See his full essay: “Unnatural acts of discovery and invention”.

Finally, this week’s Red Folder has a call from the organizers of the 2015 Global Physics Photowalk for help in picking their winning photograph. The Photowalk is an annual event that involves eight particle physics labs on four continents opening their doors to photographers for two days. Past photographs have been stunning – and often highly creative – interpretations of workplaces that probably seem mundane to the physicists who work there.

You can vote for three of your favourite photos of 2015 from a shortlist of 24 – three from each of the participating labs. Of course some of the images are of impressive pieces of experimental, there are also black and white studies of form and perspective – and there is even a lovely inter-generational photograph of two physicists hard at work. The winners will be announced in December.