Date: October 29, 2011

Title: Bang! A Comic About How All Things Came To Be

Podcaster: Paul Caggegi

Link: The Process Diary

Description: Paul Caggegi of The Process Diary talks to Jamie Dunbar, the author and artist behind The Universe Verse – a trilogy in which two books have been published so far: BANG! And It’s Alive!

Bio: Paul Caggegi is a freelance video editor and 3D motion graphics artist working in Sydney Australia. He hosts “the process diary” – a podcast about showing you how it’s done by going out and doing it.

Sponsor:This episode of “365 Days of Astronomy” has been sponsored by — NO ONE. We still need sponsors for many days in 2011, so please consider sponsoring a day or two. Just click on the “Donate” button on the lower left side of this webpage, or contact us at signup@365daysofastronomy.org.

Transcript:

Paul:

Hi everyone and welcome to the process diary. I have with me today a very special guest. I got interested in a podcast called skepticality many many moons ago. I could be wrong but I believe this is one of the first episodes I ever heard was an interview with this gentleman on an artistic endeavour to explain – or at least illustrate – the origins of, well… everything. Jamie Dunbar, the author and artist behind The Universe Verse – a trilogy in which two books have been published so far: BANG! And It’s Alive! And today I’m really excited to talk about… well… everything! So hi, Jamie, how’re you doing?

Jamie:

I’m doing very well.

Paul:

Tell us a little bit about yourself.

Jamie:

I am in the process of writing, illustrating and self-publishing three scientifically accurate, rhyming comic books about the origin of the universe, and life on Earth, and the human race. I’ve finished the first two, and those are available. Right now I’m just gearing up to illustrate the third one, which will be kind of about the evolution of the human species and a quick trip through the dawn of civilization. I think that I’ve always been interested in children’s books, like when I was illustrating… when I was writing these books part of what I would do was go to the public library and hang out in the children’s section, and um, you know look for illustrators that might strike me. I often list doctor Seuss as one of my inspirations, but that’s, I think, a combination of his artistic style and also his writing style and the content that he presents.

Paul:

what made you decide to do a scientifically accurate, rhyming book for kids?

Jamie:

I’ve always, kind of, had an interest in presenting information, and presenting information to children of a young age, the sort of information that maybe people would think was too complicated or was inappropriate. I thought it would be really fun to write a book for children about where they had come from. But I really wanted to take an approach that was very scientifically based in terms of explaining essentially, genes, and heredity, and evolution – what I thought were the most important parts about where people came from.

The problem I got into was I kept thinking well, to explain this I’m gonna have to explain DNA, I’m gonna have to explain genes, I have to explain evolution, and I have to explain cells, and so you know, I wanna explain where cells and DNA came from, and how they came to be like they are, and so I want to explain how life on Earth might have originated, and how Earth could have originated and – as you can see I just kept going backwards, and at a certain point I thought well, hey: why not start at the beginning?

Once I made that decision I started doing some fresh research. I was living in Boston at the time so I went to the libraries and I set myself a schedule where three days a week – no two days a week I was at the library for eight hours researching, looking at children’s books, looking at science books, and drawing and writing. And over the course of like, six or seven months I managed to write the first drafts of the first three books.

I’ve always enjoyed science from a young age, so I felt pretty comfortable in most part with the concepts. It was a matter I think largely or figuring out how to order things, how to present them, which things to leave out, which were the most important – you know, forging my own path and then taking it to scientists, making sure I hadn’t made any embarrassing errors that the comic’s gonna get in trouble for if I promoted this as being scientifically accurate.

There is, I would say, another problem that one person brought up. This objection came from a parent blogger, I think. So they weren’t particularly credentialed but I actually think that the question they raise is very valid. And it has to do with the very beginning. The first line of the book of BANG! “In the beginning,before time had begun, nothing existed, and nothing was fun”. And they point out that “well, before the first Big Bang, before the Singularity, there’s really no way we could have any idea what existed. It could have been nothing, but it could have been something.

Paul:

It could have been very fun.

Jamie:

Right. Yeah, exactly. So actually since they brought that up I’ve been trying to think of another way to begin that book, and I haven’t come up with something that I’m satisfied with yet. I guess my defence that I’ve been trying to justify it with is this idea that before the Singularity, we have absolutely no information on what could have existed. So it’s nothing to us in that we can’t say anything about it.

Paul:

Yes exactly, I mean is that because our notion of maths and physics breaks down at that point?

Jamie:

Right. It’s the idea that at such an extreme level of temperature, density, and energy, all the rules that we have don’t apply. And so we can’t really say at all what could have happened before, because we don’t know how things could have been effected, and we can’t really imagine what happens at that level of energy.

Paul:

it’s also interesting that it’s definitely the whole expansion of the universe, I mean, uh, the Big Bang is a misnomer, it was actually a derogatory term of the actual theory, and that’s what people often fail to understand, it’s more of an expansion: we know that this expansion existed because of the speed at which the galaxies are flying apart

Jamie:

Yeah I certainly got a kick out of learning that the Big Bang was initially an insult of a scientific theory. So I start with the Big Bang, from this “nothingness” the next thing of course is a point of infinite density and energy, in a very small space. And then I go through the expansion of the universe, formation of the fundamental forces, and then basic creation of matter, including anti-matter, and then sub-atomic particles, particles, elements – how elements get formed in different levels of stars, and then supanovas, and galaxies, and that’s book one.

Paul:

I think the most interesting, fascinating bit for me was the formation of quarks and how you went through the rhyme of that.

Jamie:

Well here, you want me to uh – I can read right here. “The first little bits to leave lasting marks as physical forms of those energy sparks are still around now, and they call themselves quarks.Bottom and Top, Charmed and Strange into Up and Down they mostly will change. These six different flavors are able to mix, and these six – when they mix – can do all sorts of tricks!” So yeah I thought it was pretty cool when I looked uh, you know researched and found that the official, scientifically accepted terms for these six types of quarks are “Bottom, Top, Charmed Strange, Up and Down”. It struck me as being very accessible, and not be the kind of complicated gobbledigook I was expecting.

Paul:

It’s amazing how simple it is to understand, that’s the real genius of the book and of course the artistry is beautiful as well. You leave it at a very specific point which opens up the door to, obviously, book two.

Jamie:

Yeah right. So um, so book one, pretty much the last thing I introduce is the galaxy as the last kind of structure, or definition there. And then I kind of explain how there are so very many galaxies, and each one of those made up of so very many stars, and each one of those stars made up of so very many atoms and that’s where I leave it off – who know what all these atoms are gonna get up to?

Paul:

Well Jamie, before I let you go, why don’t you tell people where they can find you, where they can buy your books?

Jamie:

Sure yeah the easiest place to find out information about me, my books, and my history, is my website: jldunbar.com and there’s links there to everything else I’m about to mention, so there are links to jamesandkenneth.com – which is the website where you can actually purchase paperback copies of the book. There are links to amazon where you can also purchase paperback copies of the book, but I actually prefer for people to go to James and Kenneth. Amazon is great if you want to write a review. I do really appreciate it when someone takes the time to give one of my books five stars and I think that helps drive a lot of sales. And finally, you can go to jldunbar.wordpress.com and there you can see this process diary Jamie style, that I’ve been trying to do to show the making-of steps in these books and in the coming months I will… I’m gonna try and finish posting stuff from book two, and move into posting more contemporary stuff – what I’m actually working on, like book three. And I’ll have the manuscript up there, I’ll start posting the thumbnails, the sketches, all that stuff. You’ll be able to see book three evolve.

Paul:

Well I encourage everyone to email Jamie for a copy, get on the mailing list for book three cos Im definitely looking forward to it. Ok James it’s been great talking to you.

Jamie:

Yeah it’s been a pleasure. Thanks for arranging this.

Paul:

The full interview can be found over at processdiary.com There we talk about book two, the publishing process, and discuss a neat little connection Jamie has with Pixar studios and the movie UP!

End of podcast:

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