Washington Post highlights the late physicist Richard Feynman

“Richard Feynman, the late physicist, is hero of new graphic novel ,” says a headline below the fold on the 1 October Washington Post Style section front page. The article might score points for physics outreach.

A graphic novel, says Wikipedia , “is a narrative work in which the story is conveyed to the reader using sequential art in either an experimental design or in a traditional comics format.”

The graphic novel Feynman, says an Amazon.com product description , “presents the larger-than-life exploits of Nobel-winning quantum physicist, adventurer, musician, world-class raconteur, and one of the greatest minds of the twentieth century: Richard Feynman,” covering “quantum electrodynamics, the fine art of the bongo drums, the outrageously obscure nation of Tuva, [and] the development and popularization of the field of physics.”

Monica Hesse’s Post article, illustrated by a frame copied from the graphic novel, echoes that description’s admiration for Feynman’s exuberant eclecticism—while adding bits of skeptical irreverence like this: “The cult of Feynman is comprised equally of brains who wish they were more whimsical and bon vivants who want to show they’re also brainy. He is the specter that guides the modern nerd—in a small corner of the geekoverse, people like him better than Einstein.” The italics come from Hesse.

But Hesse also adds comments from Lawrence Krauss, the theoretical physicist who recently published Quantum Man: Richard Feynman’s Life in Science . She introduces Feynman’s own popular 1985 autobiography Surely You’re Joking, Mr. Feynman !

And in her opening, Hesse laments what she calls the “sad fact—an endlessly rehashed symbol of just what is wrong with America—that we make heroes of athletes but not mathletes, that we write comic books about men with capes but not real men with calculators, and that ‘Dancing With the Stars,’ has never tapped Andre Geim or Konstantin Novoselov, who—oh, admit it, you had to Google them—were last year’s winners of the Nobel Prize in physics.”

That’s a call from a Washington Post reporter for more respect and attention to science and scientists. So maybe science outreach advocates will be glad all the same if she wants, in her next breath, also to quip, “Let us now commence an ode to a dead scientist.”

Steven T. Corneliussen, a media analyst for the American Institute of Physics, monitors three national newspapers, the weeklies Nature and Science, and occasionally other publications. His reports to AIP are published in ‘Science and the media.’ He has published op-eds in the Washington Post and other newspapers, has written for NASA’s history program, and is a science writer at a particle-accelerator laboratory.