|
|
Liboff, an emeritus professor in the School of Electrical and Computer Engineering who still works on physics problems in his Cornell office every day, was delighted when one of his students told him that his book is featured in the science-fiction action thriller. “It’s a great advertisement ... and now I have people calling me up,” he said. The same student tried to “sponge” answers to two homework problems while telling him about the movie, Liboff recalled with a smile. Describing himself as “a full-time retired professor,” Liboff admitted that he hadn’t actually seen the complete movie. An Ithaca movie theater gave him and his wife free tickets, but the physicist left after the dropped-book scene. “It lasts for about one microsecond,” Liboff said. The scene is a key one in the movie, however, establishing Parker’s scientific talents, his teenage insecurity, and his difficulty in balancing his life as a student and a superhero. Adam Black, Liboff’s editor at Addison-Wesley and the person who first spotted the book in the film, sent 120 of the publisher’s employees an e-mail boasting of “the only physics book fit for superheroes” and “where Spider-Man learns his death-defying physics from.” Said Blakeley Kim, who designed the book’s cover, “It was a company pride sort of thing.” Introductory Quantum Mechanics was first published by Holden-Day in 1980. Since its first printing with Addison-Wesley in 1987, it has sold an estimated 100,000 copies—a number that is off the charts as college textbooks go. “It is probably the best-selling quantum mechanics textbook in the world at its level,” said Black. No one, including officials at Sony Pictures and Columbia University, seems quite sure why or how Liboff’s text was chosen for the movie role. —Thomas Oberst |
