Lecture on the H-Bomb
Sep. 27th, 2002 12:55 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
grinninfooleI went to a really interesting lecture tonight with Guitarman, a fellow History of Science student here at UMass. I can't recall the professor's name right now (I'm very tired), but he's from Harvard and he talked about the development of the H-Bomb here in the USA and the moral/political debate that raged about it between 1945 and 1951. The point of the talk, however, was not to run down this history, though he did, but to discuss how one presents it. He first give us excerpts from a learned piece he wrote for a scholarly history of physics journal (circulation 450), and talked about the advantages of print for presenting rigorously structured arguments and setting out complex comparisons simply.
Then he showed excerpts from a film he had produced for the History Channel about this same topic, and the advantages of that choice. While much of the technical and scientific detail of the paper was not in the film, what he was concerned to present were the arguments to build the bomb and the arguments not to, and how they played out. Both, in short were intelligent, informed sources of info on this tremendously important piece of human history, and each had different strengths, weaknesses, and audiences. (The film was seen by about 1,000,000 people on first airing.)
Naturally, I asked him if he had thought of doing work in a comics format so that he could exploit the emotive power imagery with the graphic possibilities of text. He confessed ignorance and seemed politely dismissive when I mentioned Larry Gonick's Cartoon History of the Universeso I think that I may send him a copy with marked passages. This guy strikes me as perhaps the one to put comics on the map for serious, hard-core scholarship.
Then he showed excerpts from a film he had produced for the History Channel about this same topic, and the advantages of that choice. While much of the technical and scientific detail of the paper was not in the film, what he was concerned to present were the arguments to build the bomb and the arguments not to, and how they played out. Both, in short were intelligent, informed sources of info on this tremendously important piece of human history, and each had different strengths, weaknesses, and audiences. (The film was seen by about 1,000,000 people on first airing.)
Naturally, I asked him if he had thought of doing work in a comics format so that he could exploit the emotive power imagery with the graphic possibilities of text. He confessed ignorance and seemed politely dismissive when I mentioned Larry Gonick's Cartoon History of the Universeso I think that I may send him a copy with marked passages. This guy strikes me as perhaps the one to put comics on the map for serious, hard-core scholarship.
