The Complete Adventures of Mr. Tompkins: Regular Edition

From author Igor Gamow:

Mr. Tompkins, the inquisitive bank clerk created by my father, physicist George Gamow, leaps into the 21st century in a new “graphic textbook”! In this mammoth tome, Tompkins meets over ten famous scientists and learns their histories and key concepts!

Albert Einstein: gravity
Sir Ernest Rutherford: the history of early atomic physics
Marie Curie: radioactivity
Charles Darwin: evolution through natural selection
Gregor Mendel: hereditary traits
James Watson, Alfred Hershey, & Martha Chase: DNA
Aristotle: the origins of biology
Leonardo da Vinci & the Wright Brothers: the origins of flight
Rachel Carson: the environmental impact of systemic pesticides
Karl von Frisch: the life of bees
George Gamow: the Big Bang theory

Father created Tompkins in 1937, and since I was born in '35 I'm in a sense Mr. Tompkins' older brother. Father thought the audience for his three Tompkins books, Mr. Tompkins in Wonderland (1940), Mr. Tompkins Explores the Atom (1944), and Mr. Tompkins Learns the Facts of Life (1953) . would be the lay public who might glean a little understanding of contemporary science if he explained it in simple, everyday language, clever analogies, and no mathematics. To his astonishment his largest audience was comprised of scientists who actually performed the scientific research he wrote about. His publishing fame grew exponentially, not only among scientists but among young students who were inspired to go into science because of his popular books. Three such students who were inspired and became noted scientists are Sir Roger Penrose, Professor Kip Thorne and Professor Paul D. Beale, (who has written the foreword for this book). To learn that so many scientists were inspired by my father's work was common during my tenure as a professor. Literally dozens of professional scientists, having seen the Gamow surname on my office door, would visit and tell me "I went into science because of the books of George Gamow."

My goal is that THE COMPLETE ADVENTURES OF MR. TOMPKINS will continue to recruit the young students who might become tomorrow's scientists, and teach them that even the most famous scientist, such as Einstein, Curie, or even Father, comes from humble origins and may one day turn the scientific world on its head with diligent study and determination. As a child in Odessa, Ukraine, he had a passion for literature and science, and by age 24 he wrote what was essentially the first book ever published on quantum mechanics.

In 1933 he and my mother escaped the Soviet Union with financial help from Niels Bohr and Marie Curie, and sailed to America, where he became a professor at George Washington University.

In 1946, at the Applied Physics Laboratory at Johns Hopkins Laboratory, my father, graduate student Ralph Alpher, and lab employee Robert Herman, used the earliest computers to calculate the origin of the chemical elements. In 1948 Father and Alpher published these findings in a now-famous paper, and were credited with the first experimental evidence for what became known as the "Big Bang" theory of the origin of the universe. (Father hated the name "Big Bang" because it was neither Big and did not go Bang!)

But for all his work on the Big Bang, it's likely Mr. Tompkins that is Father's greatest legacy. As I visited with dozens of educators on how I could modernize my father's character and bring him to a new audience, nothing seemed quite right until a colleague introduced me to talented comic book artist/graphic designer Scorpio Steele. Scorpio and I have now worked on THE ADVENTURES OF MR. TOMPKINS for many years, and the entire fruits of our collective labor are contained in this book. Educational graphic novels may possibly be the future of progressive science text books worldwide, and I am delighted that in this class of books I can include THE COMPLETE ADVENTURES OF MR. TOMPKINS.