Have I mentioned how much I like Valancourt Books?  A couple of weeks ago, I reviewed their reprint of a rare Gothic classic, The Animated Skeleton, and even got a nice comment from the publisher/editor of Valancourt.  I vowed to look into more of Valancourt’s publications, but didn’t even realize that I already had!  In addition to publishing a line of classic Gothic literature, they’ve been printing classics of the 1890s, including a number of books by suspense/weird fiction writer Richard Marsh.  This is a real treat; as I’ve noted before in my discussion of Marsh’s book The Beetle, he was an extremely popular author of his time (even outselling Dracula for a while).  I’ve been looking into buying more of Marsh’s work, and had purchased Marsh’s The Joss: A Reversion and The Seen and the Unseen without realizing they were also Valancourt editions!

I’ll eventually get to commenting more on Marsh’s work on this blog, but I thought I’d mention that Valancourt is doing an excellent job reprinting these classic ‘lost’ works.  The book quality is excellent, and an added treat is that the covers are reproductions of the original editions.

Fans of classic horror, suspense, and mysteries would be well-advised to give these editions a look.  In addition, there’s currently a sale on a number of Valancourt’s titles, including some of Marsh’s work; check them out!

There were whispers on the message boards at Valancourt that they may produce a new edition of The Beetle, in which case I’ll be replacing my rather flimsy current copy…

I’m in between blog major blog posts right now, but I thought I’d highlight another very timely essay of H.P. Lovecraft’s, in which he discusses superstition in times of trouble.  This can be found in the excellent collection of Lovecraft’s philosophical essays, and excerpts appear below the fold.  The essay appeared in the magazine Conservative 4, No. 1 (July 1918), pp. 4-5.

Merlinus Redivivus

In humanity’s age-long struggle for emancipation from the ignoble chains of superstition, no retarding influence has been more potent than that of national distress.  The inevitable result of a great war or social crisis is to cloud the atmosphere for rational perception; to inflame the imagination beyond the realm of calm analysis, and to give unbounded licence to untrustworthy impressions, superficial doctrines, antiquated fallacies, distorted coincidences, psychopathic delusions, and irresponsible thoughts to which wishes alone are the fathers.

…

Spiritualism, whose adherents now number many former men of science who should know better, is a frank surrender of judgment to vague subjective impressions.  None knows better than the sober psychologist how vivid some apparently occult manifestations may be to certain types of persons; yet the sober thinker can see further than the spiritualist, and can analyse the phenomena, tracing them to a material cause in the consciousness of the subject.

The prime obstacle to truth in this struggle is the will.  Overpowered by a desire to believe in the supernatural, men are everywhere ignoring patent scientific principles and encroaching upon borderlands where evidence is highly coloured with illusion.  Against common sense is arrayed a flimsy mass of dream-stuff which under ordinary conditions would be laughed out of court.

Were material communication really possible, or the dead able to make themselves known to the living, it is safe to state that the world would be a very different place.  Secrecy would be non-existent, and death would be no mystery.  In fact, the very rarity and frivolity of alleged spiritual messages are enough to condemn them as frauds or hallucinations.

However general may be the relapse of the world into mediaeval credulity, it is to be hoped that Anglo-Saxon sense and conservatism may exempt our particular realm from so pitiable an intellectual debacle.

This is another one of those essays which might as well have been written yesterday (except for the association of ‘conservative’ with ‘intellectual’).  Lovecraft was criticizing the rise of spiritualism during WWI.  I leave it to the reader to draw their own conclusions as to the contemporary relevance.

Reading passages like this really make me sorry that I didn’t get a chance to meet Lovecraft, and that he died so early in life!  He did have some surprisingly narrow-minded views (note his obsession with ‘Anglo-Saxon’ superiority), but overall he was a remarkably enlightened fellow.

I went to work out a little while ago and turned on Headline News to catch up.  Violence has unfortunately flared in Lebanon again, and a CNN news crew is caught in the middle.

CNN likes to update the caption of their ‘breaking news’ frame with background information.  By the time I had tuned in, the caption read:

BREAKING NEWS:  Political instability has existed in Lebanon for months

I guess it depends on your definition of ‘breaking’…

I feel like a kid again.

When I was young, I scrupulously saved my ‘proof-of-purchase’ from all my Star Wars figures so that I could get the precious Boba Fett action figure, which could only be purchased through mail order.  Oddly, as I recall, this was before The Empire Strikes Back came out, so nobody actually knew who Boba Fett was, but I didn’t care: he looked cool.  The challenge was waiting the 6-8 weeks for delivery, which made me think, as Calvin of Calvin & Hobbes once said, “I’ll be OLD then!”

I’ve got that feeling again, but now it isn’t action figures I’m waiting for (I swear I just heard a huge sigh of relief from the fiancée), but articles ordered through InterLibrary Loan.  I’ve been having so much fun reading and researching old scientific papers that I’ve put in about a dozen requests over the past couple of weeks, all for papers which are circa 1900 and extremely out of date.  (The librarians have to be wondering what on Earth is going through my head.)  Now I find myself compulsively checking the library web page, just like I checked the mailbox as a kid, and impatiently shaking my fist at the screen.

On the bright side, the articles I’ve gotten so far are utterly fascinating, and once I’ve got them all together I’ll have a really neat post.  Stay tuned!

(Hooray!  As I was writing this, an email arrived, telling me that another ILL arrived!)

My friend Personal Demon tipped me off to a potentially historic skydiving event that will be happening in roughly 17 days; Michel Fournier of France will attempt to break the record for the highest freefall.  Ascending in a pressurized capsule attached to a high-altitude balloon, Fournier will dive from 130,000 feet (25 miles) over the plains of Saskatchewan, Canada.

The previous record goes back to Joseph Kittinger, Air Force pilot and all-around Übermensch.  In 1960, he participated in Project Excelsior, which was implemented to study the effects of high-altitude bailout on pilots.  Kittinger left a balloon at 102,800 feet, and fell for 4 minutes and 36 seconds reaching a maximum speed of 614 mph!  (Kittinger is less-known for being one of the few pilots who had to bail out of his jet in a thunderstorm.  The storms kept him aloft under parachute for 20 minutes before dumping him to the ground.)

Fournier’s group claims that their event is being done for similar medical and technological reasons, but it will at the very least be a very cool human accomplishment.  I’m staying tuned…

Now that I’ve actually written my “classic science” blog post, I realized I didn’t plan any way to compile all the entries in the end! If you accept the “challenge” (I keep putting the word in quotes because I don’t want to sound like I’m trying to be confrontational), and post an entry, send me an email! I’ve put together a permanent page to compile all the entries together in one easy to find spot.

(I think I didn’t plan ahead because I didn’t think anyone was actually reading my blog!)

One final note:  Just to have an end date associated with the challenge, let’s mark the end of May as the official end date; I’ll do a summary post at the end about everyone’s entries.

I haven’t done a “Horror Masters” post for a while, and it’s long past due!

Even if you’ve never read a Dean Koontz novel, you’re familiar with his work.  Airport bookstores are constantly stocked with his books; finding a horror author whose last name doesn’t start with “K” can be quite a challenge when traveling (King, of course, being the other one).

Broadly speaking, it is easy at first glance to dismiss Koontz as a “pop” horror author of no serious depth.  Many of his novels, especially his early work, follow a certain well-defined plot structure: boy/girl hero meets girl/boy love interest, both are threatened by some mysterious entity, they flee, they have a final confrontation with said entity in some isolated location and live happily ever after.  Furthermore, his short stories, such as those compiled in Strange Highways, often seem clumsy and somehow ‘inefficient’.

It would be easy to dismiss Koontz as another pop horror author showering the shelves with forgettable drek (I’m lookin’ at you, Preston and Child!), except for one important, undeniable, unavoidable reality:

Dean Koontz’s story ideas are incredibly, almost maddeningly, clever - and they’re executed brilliantly.

It’s a bit hard to explain what I mean by this without spoiling the stories of his novels, and they really should be read firsthand to appreciate them.  Almost every Koontz novel I’ve read contains one really ingenious, imaginative idea which forms a solid foundation for the rest of the book.  Building from this one clever idea, Koontz usually develops its implications and consequences in unexpected ways.  The end result is typically one of those “unable to put it down until it’s done” novels that deserves its dominance of the shelves of airport shops.

As far as recurring themes in Koontz’s work, only one stands out to me.  Koontz is possibly unique among horror authors in that he uses horror to explore a positive theme, which might be best characterized as the quest for meaning.  Sometimes this quest takes a material form, as in his book Intensity; other times it is much more subtle, but it always seems to be present.  Koontz himself seems to acknowledge this in his introduction to Richard Laymon’s book To Wake the Dead; after describing an unusually similar pair of car accidents he had been involved in, Koontz states:

The uncanny similarity of the details of these two accidents suggests to me - as do so many things in life - a world that operates not always according to the predictable laws of physics and chance, but also and perhaps as often under the influence of a mysterious power with a delightfully byzantine sense of story and with an agenda that is, though perhaps not inscrutable, challenging to analyze and understand.

I would guess that this attitude also accounts for some of Koontz’s mass appeal.  Unlike most horror writers, Koontz lets his readers “off the hook” a little by suggesting that even though horrible things can and do happen, there is some greater purpose to it all.

I should point out that Koontz never gets “preachy” with his views on spirituality.  Even though my opinion of religion has declined in recent years, Koontz’s stories still resonate with me.

Koontz has way too many novels to describe in detail.  I’ll just provide a list of some of my favorites:

1.  Watchers (1987).  Travis Cornell stumbles across a stray dog while out on a hike.  He takes the dog in, and quickly realizes that there’s far more to the animal than meets the eye.  Also, it begins to dawn on him that the dog is being hunted by something - and now he’s being hunted as well.

It’s weird to say this, but Watchers is an utterly charming horror novel.  Fans of canines will love it to death.

2.  Phantoms (1983).  Jennifer Paige returns home to the sleepy ski town of Snowfield with her younger sister Lisa.  They find the entire town seemingly deserted.  A contingent of county sheriffs arrive sometime later to investigate, and the entire group begins to be haunted by weird apparitions: flying, unnatural creatures.  The creatures begin to claim members of the party, and it rapidly becomes clear that they will not be allowed to leave - or live.

Phantoms is one of my favorite Koontz novels, and contains one of my favorite scenes in any horror novel.  Once the characters realize what they’re up against in Snowfield, they begin to discuss options for survival: and they shoot them down one by one.  You could say that the laws of physics themselves dictate that the characters are doomed.  I don’t know I’ve ever read a better depiction of utter hopelessness in a horror novel.

One of the later editions of Phantoms contains a retrospective by Koontz about how the novel actually made him a horror author!  He had considered himself more of a suspense/thriller writer, but the runaway success of Phantoms seized control of his career.

3.  Lightning (1988).  When Laura Shane was born, a mysterious stranger appeared, heralded by lightning, and prevented her delivery from being botched by a troubled surgeon.  Since then, this guardian angel has appeared at different times of crisis in Laura’s life, always rescuing her.  The book gradually unravels the mystery of Laura’s life and the origins of the stranger who protects her.

4.  Dragon Tears (1993).  A fast-paced, intense horror/thriller.  Policeman Harry Lyon thought he was having a bad day when he was forced to kill a man on a murderous rampage.  But later that day, he is approached by a mysterious vagrant who happily declares, “Ticktock, ticktock… you’ll be dead in sixteen hours,”  before exploding into a pile of debris.  Harry finds himself racing against the clock against a seemingly omnipotent foe who can appear and disappear at will - and even stop time.

5.  Intensity (1996).  Chyna Shephard is staying at her friend Laura’s home when a psychopathic killer invades and murders Laura and her family while they sleep.  Chyna manages to hide during the killings, but quickly decides to follow the murderer - to stop him and to rescue his next victim.  What follows is a deadly serious game of cat-and-mouse which lives up to the title of the novel.

Intensity is perhaps the most ‘unconventional’ of Koontz’s novels; by no stretch of the imagination can one say that it follows his usual plot outline.

6.  Odd Thomas (2003).  Odd Thomas is a curious young man, seemingly without ambition, but who has a secret: he can see and talk to ghosts and spirits.  The presence of many evil spirits around a stranger in town leads Odd to investigate, and he must race against time to prevent a horrifying catastrophe.

This is another of Koontz’s unconventional novels.  The story is unpredictable and ‘oddly’ sentimental.  The character has now inspired several sequels, including Forever Odd (2005) , Brother Odd (2006), and the soon to be released Odd Hours (2008).

6.  Cold Fire (1991).  Reporter Holly Thorne is covering a routine story at a local elementary school when a mysterious stranger appears seemingly from nowhere and rescues a child from being run over by a car. Something about the rescuer, Jim Ironheart, captures her attention, and a literature search demonstrates that Jim has been the hero many times around the country, always appearing in the nick of time to perform a rescue.  Holly pursues Jim and becomes wrapped up in his quest - and the strange forces that guide him in it.

This is by far my favorite Koontz novel.  It contains a scene much like the one described above in Phantoms, where a lead character realizes exactly how screwed he is.

***

I should mention that, as far as movie adaptations are concerned, Koontz suffers from the “King curse”, in which the vast majority of adaptations are utter crap.  This includes the film adaptation of Watchers and an utterly abysmal adaptation of Phantoms.  Only two stand out: Intensity (1997) (which I haven’t seen, but which stars John C. McGinley, and therefore can’t be all that bad), and Black River (2001).  The latter, which stars Jay Mohr, is about a writer who wanders into the town of Black River and finds that events, and people, are conspiring against him leaving…

I just saw this article on CNN the other day: Planes slow down to save fuel. Apparently airlines are finally starting to feel the pinch of higher gas prices, and are learning that going at a slightly slower speed can save significant money.

This isn’t a new observation: young folks today probably aren’t aware of the fact that the former national 55 mph speed limit was originally implemented in 1974 not for safety, but to conserve fuel in the wake of the 1973 oil crisis.

The reality is that air resistance becomes a major limiting factor on fuel efficiency at high speeds.  Roughly speaking, the drag force increases as the square of the velocity at high speeds, which means that driving 100 mph results in 4 times the drag force that driving at 50 mph causes.

I drive a hybrid Civic, and the dynamic mpg gauge on the vehicle gives me significant insight into how air resistance kills fuel efficiency.  I typically find that, driving steady at 55 mph, I can get 40-50 mpg.  Once I push the car up past 70 mph, and into 80 mph, I’m lucky to get 35 mpg.  At low speeds, the car can ‘coast’ for appreciable distances without using fuel, but at high speeds, the engine must constantly work against the drag force.

These numbers, over long periods of time, add up: driving a little slower on a day-to-day basis can save you some significant money in the long run.

Update: In my haste to finish this “monster” post, I neglected to include an introduction to standing waves, an explanation which is crucial to understanding the experiment.  That oversight has been corrected.

A couple of weeks ago I issued a “challenge” to my fellow science bloggers: find, read, and blog about a classic, (preferably pre-WWII) scientific paper. There’s so much interesting historical context and methodological information hidden away that’s worth a second look.

For my part in the challenge, I chose an 1890 paper by Otto Wiener, “Stehende Lichtwellen und die Schwingungsrichtung polarisirten Lichtes,” Ann. Phys. Chem. 38 (1890), 203-243. Loosely translated, the title is, “Standing light waves and the oscillation direction of the polarization of light.”

The experiment that Wiener performed, as we will see, is conceptually simple and elegant. I foolishly thought that this would “translate” into a short, easy to cope with paper. As one can see from the citation above, no such luck: the paper is 40 pages of somewhat antiquated German! I accepted my fate, though, and soldiered on. A description begins below the fold…

In the year 1890, the idea that light is in fact an electromagnetic wave was relatively new. James Clerk Maxwell had demonstrated theoretically in his 1865 paper that the electromagnetic field equations allowed wave solutions which propagated at the velocity of light; this led him to speculate, in his words, that

The agreement of the results seems to show that light and magnetism are affections of the same substance, and that light is an electromagnetic disturbance propagated through the field according to electromagnetic laws.

The first person to demonstrate the existence of electromagnetic waves was Heinrich Hertz. In 1887 he experimentally demonstrated that radio waves were consistent with Maxwell’s theory, measuring their velocity, electric field intensity and polarization properties. He also produced radio standing waves by reflection from a zinc plate.

Standing waves are an important part of the discussion which follows, so it is worth taking a moment to explain them.  When a monochromatic wave is reflected off of a surface, the reflected wave and the incident wave combine to form waves which oscillate up and down but have no direction of motion: standing waves.  This is shown in the animation below:

In this picture, the wave is incident from the left of the image onto a hard surface (not drawn) on the right.  The wave reflects from this surface, incurring a change of sign as it does so, and the total wave simply oscillates ‘in place’.  It can be seen that there are points in space where there is never any oscillation (nodes of the standing wave) and there are points in space where the oscillations are maximum (the antinodes of the standing wave).  For visible light, these oscillations happen much too fast for the eye to detect, and one only registers an average ‘brightness’ of the wave field.  The nodes, which contain no light, appear dark, while the antinodes appear bright:

Two important points: First, the distance between successive nodes or antinodes is half the wavelength of the wave.  Second, the absolute position of the nodes and antinodes depends on whether the wave ‘changes sign’ upon reflection.  The earlier animation was produced assuming that the reflected wave has the opposite sign of the incident wave.  A comparison of how the picture changes if the reflected wave has the same sign as the incident wave is shown below:

By 1890, then, scientists were interested in studying standing waves of light: it seems that a number of them remained unconvinced that light truly was just another manifestation of electromagnetic waves! One big obstacle stood in the path of such studies: the smallness of the wavelength of light. Hertz’s radio waves had a wavelength of meters, but visible light has a wavelength on the order of 500 nanometers, or 500 billionths of a meter! Such distances cannot be directly observed with the naked eye, so experimental ingenuity was required - and Otto Wiener provided it.

As we will see, there is some irony associated with Weiner’s work. The majority of the paper is devoted to experiments relating to the so-called “mechanical theory of light”, the idea (invalidated by Einstein’s relativity) that light waves are in fact an oscillation of some as yet undiscovered material medium, dubbed the “aether”. The most important part of Weiner’s work, the interpretation of his results in the context of electromagnetic theory, seems almost an afterthought in the paper!

We’ll discuss the paper in reverse order: we’ll discuss the most ‘timeless’ results first, then backtrack to discuss the other parts of the paper and their historical context.

A beam of light, being an electromagnetic excitation, consists of a combined oscillating electric field E and oscillating magnetic field H, both transverse to the direction of motion, as shown below:

The oscillations of the electric and magnetic field are 180° out of phase: that is, when the electric field strength is a maximum, the magnetic field strength is a minimum, and vice versa. Both fields can induce forces in electrical charges, according to the Lorentz force law:

In optics, however, the electric field is the typically the only field that is considered important, and the ‘polarization’ of the light field is associated with the direction of the electric field; the magnetic field is for the most part ignored. Do we have a justification for this neglect?

In 1890, there was no such justification. Since the structure of the atom was still unknown, there was no clear understanding of how a light field should interact with matter. For instance, what part of the light field is involved in chemical processes such as developing a photograph, the E-field or the H-field?

Wiener developed the following experiment, depicted below, to specify the role of the electric field in optics:

An electromagnetic plane wave is incident normally on a plane mirror, assumed for simplicity to be perfectly reflecting. The combined incident and reflected waves form a standing wave, and a transparent, thin photographic plate is placed in the pattern at an angle from the mirror. At the surface of the metal, the electric field must be zero: the free electrons in the metal move about to cancel the field. But, because of the complementary behavior of the electric and magnetic fields, the magnetic field must have a maximum at the surface!

One can readily calculate that the electric field should have maxima at heights such that

while the magnetic field should have maxima at heights such that

Here is the wavelength of the light. The maximas of the electric field and magnetic field occur at different points in space! By observing the height at which a photographic plate is darkened, one can determine whether the electric or magnetic field, or both, are most important in light-chemical interactions. In Wiener’s own words,

In den Schwingungsknoten der electrischen Kräfte findet ein Minimum, in den Schwingungsbäuchen derselben ein Maximum der chemischen Wirkung statt; oder: die chemische Wirkung der Lichtwelle ist an das Vorhandensein der Schwingungen der electrischen und nicht der magnetischen Kräfte geknüpft.

Translated:

In the nodes of the electric forces a minimum takes place, in the antinodes of the same a maximum of the chemical effect; or: the chemical effect of the light wave is attached to the presence of the oscillations of the electric and not the magnetic forces.

Wiener had demonstrated, in the context of the electromagnetic theory, that the electric field is the ‘active ingredient’ in light waves.

Wiener’s experimental apparatus was also groundbreaking - and simple! The standing wave pattern of a light wave is too small to be recorded directly in the z-direction, but Wiener overcame this by tilting the film at a very small angle from the mirror surface. In this way, the interference pattern is ’stretched out’ along the length of the photographic film.

The film itself presented its own challenges, however. The photosensitive layer had to be not only transparent, so the incident and reflective waves could freely travel through it, but also significantly thinner than a wavelength: a thick film would end up being almost uniformly developed. Again quoting Wiener,

Es könnten demnach etwa hundert Wellenzüge längs der Dickenausdehnung einer Gelatineplatte Platz finden.Würde man also die Platte der Wirkung einer stehenden Lichtwelle aussetzen und nach dem Entwickeln betrachten, so müsste man an jeder Stelle der Platte die Wirkung von 100 Wellenzügen übereinandergedeckt sehen; die Platte wäre anscheinend gleichförmig geschwärzt.Eine Untersuchung der stehenden Welle ist vielmehr nur dann denkbar, wenn man ihre Wirkung auf einer Strecke, die einen kleinen Bruchtheil der Wellenlänge beträgt, gesondert erhalten kann.Die nächste Aufgabe war also, zu suchen, ob es möglich sei, eine durchsichtige lichtempfindliche Schicht herzustellen, deren Dicke gegen die Länge einer Lichtwelle hinreichend klein ist.

Translated,

About hundred wave trains could therefore find along the thickness expansion of a gel plate place. If one would thus expose and after developing would regard the plate to the effect of a standing light wave, then one would have to see the effect covered of 100 wave trains in each place of the plate; the plate would be apparent homogeneously blackened. An investigation of the standing wave is rather conceivable only if one can keep their effect on a distance, which amounts to a small fraction of the wavelength, separate. The next task was thus to search whether it was possible to manufacture a transparent photo-sensitive layer whose thickness is sufficiently small against the length of a light wave.

Wiener considered several of the classic photographic methods of the time. The Daguerrotype method, developed in 1839, involves an exposure on a mirrored surface coated with silver halide particles. Though the active layer is thin, it possesses a high level of reflection, which makes it unsuitable for a standing wave measurement. Another technique, ‘Owed to the good-nature of the Honorable Professor Rose’, is based on the fact that a homogeneous iodine silver layer can be made photosensitive by an application of nitric silver. Again, however, the layer possesses a high level of reflection.

The final decided upon technique is known as a ‘wet plate collodion process‘. Collodion is a celluloid-like film which is sufficiently transparent and thin for the proposed experiment. The thickness was determined by another clever trick: a section of the collodion was wiped away from the glass plate, and a second glass plate was placed upon it to form a wedge shape. Light passing through this wedge surface forms interference fringes, which can be analyzed to determine the plate thickness. Wiener determined his layer to be roughly 1/30th of the wavelength of the light used. As a sodium arc lamp with wavelength approximately 600 nm was used, this implies a photosensitive layer of 20 nm.

As mentioned, the primary investigations of the paper were actually related to the so-called “mechanical theory of light”. In the years before Einstein, there was a strong feeling in the scientific community that light waves, like sound waves and water waves, involved the mechanical vibration of some sort of as-yet unknown substance (dubbed “the aether”). There was much interest in determining the properties of this hypothetical material (a brief summary given here). One important point of contention was the nature of light waves: were they purely transverse (vibrating perpendicular to the direction of motion, like water waves), or did they also consist of longitudinal components (vibrating along the direction of motion, like sound waves). Transverse waves would undergo a 180° phase change upon reflection at a mirror, while longitudinal waves would undergo no phase change.

Wiener performed a number of different experiments to examine how light waves reflected at surfaces. Not surprisingly, regardless of whether the light was polarized or unpolarized, the phase change was always 180°, consistent with the ‘transverse wave’ hypothesis. Of course, by this time the mechanical theory of light was already dying, mortally wounded by the Michelson-Morely experiment’s inability to detect motion with respect to the aether. Einstein would deal the final blow with his theory of relativity, and Wiener’s investigations of the aether would be mostly forgotten.

His investigations did change Wiener’s own opinion, though. In his own words,

Ehe ich zu den ersten Experimenten dieser Arbeit schritt, waren mir an deren Gelingen im Hinblick auf die electromagnetische Lichttheorie Zweifel aufgestiegen.

Roughly translated,

Before I walked to the first experiments of this work, me at their success regarding the electromagnetic light theory doubts had ascended.

Me & the fiancée just got back from seeing Iron Man, and I gotta say: cool! A few observations:

1. The director, Jon Favreau, is to Hollywood films what a closer is to a baseball team. At least, that’s what he’s starting to look like to me: the guy who can take what seems like a losing situation and turn it around. He made Elf a genuinely funny film, and he took what I would have considered one of the most difficult Marvel characters to translate to film and made what is one of the best comic-to-film translations yet.
2. Robert Downey Jr. also does a masterful job of making Tony Stark simultaneously rather reprehensible and incredibly likable.
3. Cheers to Jeff Bridges as well. I own all the original “Iron Monger” series of Iron Man comics and loved them, and I had my doubts that he could carry the character, but he did so excellently. Now I’ve got this urge to head back to my childhood home and read them all again…
4. There are a number of excellent in-jokes for those fans of Marvel comics in general and Iron Man in particular, and not just the obligatory Stan Lee appearance.
5. Speaking of in-jokes, make sure you stay ’till the end of the credits for one of the coolest end ’stingers’ ever!
6. Recently a poll was done on ScienceBlogs about the best ‘pro-science’ movies.  I’d like to think Iron Man has a place on the list!