J.J.S. Boyce wrote this for Sleeping Hedgehog.
Ohmsha’s Manga Guide series – with expert English translations courtesy of No Starch Press – has consistently shown its ability to do everything an introductory textbook aims to do, achieving maximum interest and conceptual mastery. The difference is, the books in this series are all wrapped up within a satisfying manga story, and at a fraction of the word count. Whether the topic is statistics, calculus, molecular biology, or databases, I would recommend these titles equally to brand new students looking for an introduction, as well as those looking for a refresher.
With each new title published, I’ve found myself consistently surprised at the ability of the technical and scenario writers to take the material of a university-level course, make it more readable than most popular science works out there, and never dumb down a thing. It’s more astounding still that they do this in 150 pages (at the high end), most of which is in comic book form.
Having said that, this latest adventure The Manga Guide to Relativity is a bit of a departure from previous entries to the series. Relativity (at least the special theory), is probably less conceptually difficult than calculus, or even statistics, and depending on your focus, may not even require more than middle school mathematics. It is usually covered as part of a foundational or modern physics course within a couple of weeks. This assumes a basic background in Newtonian mechanics and optics, of course. But the grandly weird theories of modern physics are too sexy to be constrained to university physics syllabi.
A minor publishing phenomenon grew out of the general audience’s hunger for the secrets of the universe, starting with Stephen Hawking’s A Brief History of Time in the ’80s, and it’s still going strong today. So what is The Manga Guide to Relativity to be: an introductory text or a pop sci treatment? Unfortunately, it seems a clear decision was never made.
Unlike every previous Manga Guide I’ve read, Relativity lacks the end of chapter practice questions. Although Yamamoto does not shy away from the equations of special relativity, he also doesn’t allow the reader to apply them to anything. While previous titles included only a small number of sample problems between chapters, it was enough to reinforce the idea that the reader was actually learning something. Despite the plucky Japanese teen characters, the books were clearly much more focused on teaching a topic than giving a general overview on it.
Yet Hawking, in his first book, quoted a piece of advice someone had passed on to him, that each equation he included would halve his book sales. So Yamamoto’s choice to derive various formulae seems to argue against a general audience approach. So does the sudden inclusion of derivative calculus at the end of chapter three. I found this particularly vexing because in the first two chapters, Yamamoto disrupted the flow by giving compressed and, in some cases, irrelevant summaries of mechanics, optics, and nuclear physics. Yet though he apparently assumes the reader is unfamiliar with even the basic concepts of position and acceleration, he feels he can apply derivatives without preamble.
I really wish an editor had sat down with the text author and scenario writers and given some clear guidance as to what kind of book this was going to be. There are no shortage of well-written pop sci primers on relativity, though there’s always room for one more, if someone has a different approach. Unlike previous entries in the Manga Guide series, however, this book is unsurprisingly un-different in its approach, analogies, and examples, virtually all of which have been seen elsewhere. It’s also surprisingly clumsy at times, both over- and under-explaining its thought experiments, and failing to make use of numerical, graphical, or visual approaches any experienced teacher of this topic ought to be familiar with. But it doesn’t work as a mathematical introduction to relativity – which would be different – either, because the text too often fails to carry a mathematical argument through to the end, and the reader is not allowed to engage with any application problems of their own.
There are redeeming qualities to this book: the artwork is first rate, and some of the thought experiments, if not original, are well served by the visual format the Manga Guides offer. It’s slimmer than just about any other popular treatment of the subject out there, though most readers will have to skim at points due to the text’s inconsistent difficulty levels. The scenario is cute, if not my favourite. But it didn’t really work for me. The previous books have consistently set such high standards that Relativity seems very muddled by comparison.
(No Starch Press, 2011)
