Author Q&A: How to write a graphic novel about quantum mechanics

Even seasoned scientists can find concepts like quantum entanglement and nonlocality hard to grasp. Jeffrey Bub and Tanya Bub are here to help.

In their new book, Totally Random: Why Nobody Understands Quantum Mechanics; A Serious Comic on Entanglement, the father–daughter authors explore some of the trickiest ideas in quantum foundations in a graphic novel format. The result, says Physics Today reviewer Richard Healey , is a “highly original” book that “will surely give you a deeper appreciation of both the peculiarity and the power of quantum mechanics.”

Physics Today asked the Bubs about their intellectual collaboration, their target audience, and their next challenge, a book on relativity.

PT: Tell us a bit about your respective backgrounds. What are your “day jobs,” and how did you arrive at them?

TB: Would you believe that I’m a part-time science writer, part-time database programmer, and part-time driftwood sculptor? I suppose my life is a study in fitting together dissimilar things. Who doesn’t like to see unlikely matchups like quantum mechanics and comic books?

JB: I studied math and physics as an undergraduate at the University of Cape Town, where I first became interested in quantum foundations. I read the Einstein-Podolsky-Rosen paper, which argued that quantum mechanics can’t be considered a complete description of physical reality, and the rebuttal by Niels Bohr as well as some related papers by David Bohm. Before reading those papers, I thought you were just a crank if you questioned theories like quantum mechanics or relativity. I was quite shocked that prominent physicists could disagree about what fundamental physics is telling us.

I went on to do a PhD in mathematical physics with Bohm at London University’s Birkbeck College, but I also spent a lot of time at the London School of Economics, hanging out with the philosophers at Karl Popper’s regular seminar on philosophy of science. After graduating I did a stint as a postdoc in the chemistry department and then the Center for Philosophy of Science at the University of Minnesota. I’m currently at the University of Maryland, working on quantum foundations.

PT: What inspired the two of you to collaborate on a graphic novel?

TB: Jeff asked me to do a few illustrations for his last book, Bananaworld: Quantum Mechanics for Primates (2015). There was one part where the reader had to visualize a complex sequence of steps. It seemed that the best way to get the point across would be to draw a series of images.

After a few tries, the illustration started to look more and more like a page from the Saturday comics. We thought: What if we don’t fight this and just go with it? So it became a two-page mini graphic novel. That turned out to be a really interesting way of making something hard a lot easier to grasp and even somewhat fun. Those two pages ended up being our favorites in the book. That’s when we started thinking about writing a whole book that way.

JB: I wrote Bananaworld for readers like Tanya’s brother Gil, who is a physiologist—that’s to say, for nonphysicists with scientific expertise who are interested in understanding what theories like quantum mechanics and relativity have to say about physical reality. The book was intended for readers who were prepared to do a bit of work to understand the basic formalism of quantum mechanics, with the payoff being a real understanding of quantum entanglement and nonlocality. The book turned out to be a bit challenging, not quite the sort of thing you can read while relaxing with a glass of wine after work.

Tanya called me up one day and said, “What do you think of the idea of writing a quantum comic together, a sort of graphic novel on quantum mechanics that everyone should be able to understand?” I thought it was a marvelous idea.

PT: Tell us about the process of putting together a graphic novel. Does the text come first? The pictures? A combination of both?

TB: The whole process was very iterative. One of us would come up with an idea: “What if we made Bohr a psychotherapist?” “What if the bit on quantum computation took place in a casino?” Then I’d work out a draft script and maybe a rough sketch of a storyboard to show Jeff. Generally he would either completely love it or completely hate it. If he hated it, I’d go back to the storyboard. Eventually we’d get through the whole sequence by honing it more and more as we went. The metric was that, above all else, it had to get across really hard ideas but also be funny and readable. We went back and forth many times, sometimes even tens of times a day. We had lots of fights. It was actually a lot of fun.

JB: It was quite a long process, and we explored several different approaches before hitting on the final version. We started out with two characters, Alice and Bob. Tanya did a whole series of pages in which she converted photographs of real people into comic characters. Gil played Bob, and I was the bum on the street selling magic “entangled” quantum coins. That was humming along until we couldn’t get the characters to work in scenarios that would allow us to explain concepts like nonlocality. The characters had become so real to us we just couldn’t get them to cooperate.

Eventually, Tanya came up with the brilliant idea of dropping Alice and Bob altogether and working with the reader as one of the protagonists, who appears only as a pair of hands tossing quantum—or rather, superquantum —"quoins.” We also introduce the narrator, in effect the voice of the book itself, a slightly obtuse but self-assured character who appears only in speech balloons and is rather slow in catching on to what the reader says.

Later we introduce Einstein and Bohm and other figures who argue about what this all means in a group therapy session conducted by Bohr. In the third part, where we talk about quantum cryptography, computation, and teleportation, other imaginary characters appear alongside the reader and narrator in a quantum casino.

PT: Who did you imagine as your ideal reader while writing and drawing the book?

TB: While I was writing the book, my actual readers were my tween and teenage kids. If you have a teenager you know they will not spare your feelings, so they make good critics. In fact, my son Arlo, who was 12 at the time, suggested a shortened cryptographic procedure that we used in the quantum cryptography section. His procedure continues to regularly stump expert readers, who write to tell us we must have missed a step.

JB: It’s surprising that people with a wide range of expertise and interests really like the book and get something from it. We had rave reviews of early drafts from an author of children’s books, a World Bank executive, and a high school student. Physicists who know a lot about quantum mechanics enjoy the book, as do readers who have read a newspaper article or two about Schrödinger’s cat and the two-slit experiment and are curious to learn more.

We take a very contemporary approach motivated by the ideas on entanglement and quantum information that followed John Bell’s stunning proof about nonlocality . This is a post-Bell book, which is, I think, the right way to think about quantum mechanics. So we don’t talk about particles being wavelike or the usual pre-Bell metaphors about what’s puzzling about quantum mechanics, and readers who expect that might be disappointed. The cat comes into the story, but not in the usual way.

PT: What is your next project?

TB: We’re working on a book on relativity that is going to allow nonmath people to see exactly what it means to say that time and space are relative by helping readers visualize light moving at one speed.

JB: There are a ton of books out there on relativity, but our approach is quite different. We get the reader to go through a series of visualizations, something like watching movies in your head. It’s not a graphic novel, but there are lots of illustrations to keep the reader on the right track. By the end of the process, you really understand the difference between relativistic spacetime and Isaac Newton’s conception of absolute space as a sort of container for events and absolute time as ticking away in the background. You’re also equipped to do calculations of relative lengths and times in a way that gives you a concrete understanding of what the numbers mean, rather than just mechanically going through the Lorentz transformation.

PT: What are you currently reading?

TB: I just finished reading Wishful Drinking by Carrie Fisher. Before that it was E=mc² by David Bodanis. Another study in the fitting together of dissimilar things!

JB: To get an idea of what other people are doing with illustrated books on science for nonscientists, I’m reading Julien Bobroff’s Mon Grand Mécano Quantique, which is about quantum experiments. Before that, I read Middlesex by Jeffrey Eugenides and one of Georges Simenon’s classic Maigret detective novels, which I do periodically to tune up my so-so French. So my reading is also a bit eclectic, like Tanya’s.