JF Ptak Science Books Post 2782
After years of interest in the development of the atomic bomb and the half+-century of physics and chemistry that went into it, the question was put to me as to when the bomb’s use at Hiroshima and Nagasaki first appeared in a comic book. (It was potentially interesting to see how long it took to see the effects of the bomb depicted to the very popular youth culture.) That led to an unexpectedly long and not very satisfying search for what turned out to be not a trivial answer. I’m not telling that story here now because the middle parts of the search are still a little unsorted–there was however another curious and provoking bit that popped up in the latest installment of the question, found in what I think is the issue of this “first” comic book appearance of the use of the atomic bomb.
Tucked inside this comic was an odd though not terribly wrong description of some of the background physics to the bomb. Amidst some fawning (?) and for no obvious reason highly caricatured images of physicists there appeared a crudely-rendered Einstein, and in his second panel, with his second blackboard, we see the The Equation, or almost so, appearing perhaps as “E=mc2” or “E=mc2” [sic]. What seems to me to be the fact of the matter is that the equation that every schoolchild knows was not a very famous face to the great idea for nearly half a century, and nearly 25 years after Einstein received his Nobel (though that was not for relativity), because it just doesn’t show up. Long story short with a new subset, it seems to me that the very first time that Einstein publishes using this equation is not until the first issue of Science Illustrated, in his article “E=mc2 the Most Urgent Problem of Our Time”, in April 1946.
[Image sources above and below: Science Comics, vol 1/1, January 1946, from the wonderful website Comic Books Plus http://comicbookplus.com/?dlid=15937. Also it is worth noting that the Enola Gay isn’t drawn very well, with extraneous stuff on the fuselage, and is also flying the wrong direction over Hiroshima and is too low…that’s all done for the sake of art, but, still, it ain’t right.]
It didn’t seem possible that it took so long for the equation to be published under Einstein’s name, but it appears that this is the case. The theory appears with much else in Einstein’s miracle year of 1905 (where it was written as a sentence and not as a formula), and there are numerous other representation of the idea of mass-energy equivalence, but so far as Einstein writing it in its most recognizable notation, publishing it under his name, it looks like the first appearance comes years later.
The equation seems not quite right here in the comic book, and of course it is a comic book characterization of Einstein who is writing it and not Einstein himself, so it seems that this is a curiosity and little else…except when you wonder where the comic book writer/inkman/artist was exposed to the equation so that he might include it in the story? This must be a shadow of something else, obviously, though not a shadow thrown directly by Einstein. (Another twist came in July 1946 when Time magazine used an image of Einstein and a mushroom cloud on their cover, with E=mc2 written onto the mushrooming cloud. This is “close” but then again, not really–also it appears after the publication of our comic book and Science Illustrated.)
Just a year earlier there was an appearance of “E=mc2 in Henry DeWolf Smyth’s Atomic Energy for Military Purposes: The Official Report on the Development of the Atomic Bomb Under the Auspices of the United States Government, 1940-1945, right there on page 2, in the introduction. (It was published months earlier in several formats by the U.S. government, though the Princeton 1945 edition reached more readers.)
This part of the story also has to wait to be told because I haven’t quite got the timeline down for the E=mc2 equation exactly as it appears and not written/published by Einstein, the earliest example that I have found thus far is 1929 (below). Today’s entry on this matter is more thinking-out-loud than anything else.
I guess the bigger question is: does it matter that E=mc2 doesn’t appear until much later, or that Einstein didn’t use it much? Probably not. Other equations–like m=E/c2 and E0=m–were used in lecture and in other papers. It is simply curious to me why the equation has such a misty history given its supra-iconic status.
- I’m a little hesitant about posting this on the equation because it seems that the answer is obvious, which makes my question seem a little kooky–so far though the answer seems not trivial.
Notes:
The first appearance in print in general of the equation is a much knottier question, with the “usual suspects” of possibilities exhausted without a satisfactory answer. I must commend Eric Sacharow (an independent scholar in Milford, Connecticut) for instantaneously suggesting several possibilities during a phone call, all of which were very good and very close to the mark, but not quite there–thus far the best of the possibilities offered.
Here’s an early appearance of E=mc2, in Revue Scientifique (Rose), 1929, in a review of physics for the previous weeks, a condensed review, signed only “S.V.”:
And in this note from the New York Times (1950, sorry no further data yet) reporting on a “garbled” notation of E=mc2 that sounds as though it was engraved on a church bell as E=mr2 itself garbles the equation as “E-mc2“:
I think that this is the first time I’ve seen E=mc^2 incorrectly written in the same journal article. It occurs in a filler article in a 1950 slug filler piece in the New York Times (sorry I do not have the exact date/page) reporting on a church near Cologne incising its bell with the world’s most famous equation but getting it wrong. The NYT reports that the equation was written as E=mr^2 instead of E-mc^2 [sic with the minus sign]. And there you have it. Highly unusual—this also comes just about two years after the first appearance of the equation that most kids know appeared in a published article by Einstein himself (in Science Illustrated, April 1946). Extraordinarily there is almost an earlier appearance of the equation in its most-known form in a kids’ comic book called Science Comics (January 1946) where it is written on a blackboard in the background as Einstein lectures to an odd assortment of scientists. I’ve wondered where the writer/artist/ink/etc. got the equation from…perhaps the Smyth Report of 1945 (page 2)? I really don’t know, though the equation is evidently first seen in a published paper by H.A. Lorentz in 1913. Maybe the comic books folks didn’t have great access to that info back there in 1946. Anyway I just wanted to share this unlikely pair of misprints from 1950.
