Jorge Cham, the author of PhD Comics, spoke at UCI last year. Ruth and I were really excited, because it happened just days after we arrived, and (being big fans) we thought this was fortuitous. Unfortunately, we weren’t all that impressed by the talk itself. Dr. Cham was almost unrelentingly negative, without it really being clear what was exaggerated for humor and what was genuine enmity. Perhaps this was a shortcoming on our end, an inability to perceive the nuances, and a reluctance to countenance anything which would discourage us during our first week as graduate students.
But, since then, I read a lot of the comics and I wonder if Cham really “gets it,” where “it” is some vague quality of what makes the pursuit of science so important to people. Take, for instance, the most recent PhD comic, about visiting with astrophysicists. It’s the second half of a two-parter, the first of which got a favorable link from Cosmic Variance, and the people there know a lot more about this stuff than me. The “Beautiful all the way down” bit is nice, but check out this corner of the comic:
You don’t have to be an astrophysicist to understand that this kind of agreement between prediction and observation is just ridiculous. To ask “That’s it,” when “it” is so impressive, just seems silly. Contrast Cham’s response with a comic by someone who definitely “gets it.” Randall Munroe is responsible for the consistently fantastic xkcd. I could be wrong about this, buy my impression is that his comic really blew up around the time that people like P.Z. Myers linked to this comic:
This isn’t to say that PhD isn’t still pretty funny. Every lab on my floor has one or two of the comics tacked up on a wall. But I just don’t understand what Cham thinks he’s proving to whom with these (real or feigned) attitudes.