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Demystifying quantum mechanics: Comic book ignites curiosity, helps turn pages with wonder at IIT-Kanpur
The comic is the latest step in a broader effort by the institute to make science more engaging. In 2025, IIT Kanpur established the Centre for Educational Research and Teaching Excellence (CERTEX) to encourage innovation in classroom teaching.
Forty-four physics students at the Indian Institute of Technology-Kanpur (IIT-K) recently spent half an hour reading a comic book in class. It was not a break from the lesson but the lesson itself.
The experiment grew out of a familiar classroom challenge. According to professor Manoj Kumar Harbola of the department of physics, many students perceive quantum mechanics as one of the most difficult subjects they encounter during their studies. His aim was to change that perception before introducing them to the mathematical rigour the subject is known for.
The idea came to him while listening to a talk on quantum physics.
“I heard someone explaining quantum physics and it struck me that what happens around us every day is quantum physics,” Harbola said.
“I thought, why not first help students recognise that? If they realise quantum mechanics is not something confined to textbooks but is all around them, the subject becomes less intimidating. Once curiosity develops, the subject becomes much easier to approach.”
That thought eventually became a comic book.
Written by Harbola and illustrated by IIT Kanpur’s design team, the comic tells a simple story built around everyday situations instead of equations. One page, for instance, uses a sunrise to explain that even the light emitted by the Sun is a consequence of quantum processes.
When Harbola distributed the comic among 44 students during a recent class, the reaction was one of surprise. Some smiled. One student looked up and asked, “Sir, yeh physics ki hi class hai na? (This is physics class, right?)”
Harbola smiled back. “Yes,” he replied. “Now read it and tell me where quantum physics appears in this story.”
There were no worksheets and no guiding questions. For the next 30 minutes, students read the comic quietly before beginning to identify quantum concepts hidden in the narrative. By the end of the exercise, they had shortlisted eight to ten topics that will now be taken up for detailed classroom discussions.
According to Harbola, the objective was never to simplify the science but to change the way students approached it.
“The comic is only a medium,” he said.
“The science remains exactly the same. We are trying to engage students through playfulness because playfulness breeds curiosity, and curiosity improves learning outcomes.”
Harbola said he was unaware of another technical institution using comics as part of classroom teaching for quantum mechanics and believes IIT Kanpur could be among the first to experiment with such an approach, though he stopped short of claiming it was the first of its kind.
The comic is the latest step in a broader effort by the institute to make science more engaging. In 2025, IIT Kanpur established the Centre for Educational Research and Teaching Excellence (CERTEX) to encourage innovation in classroom teaching.
Even before CERTEX was set up, the institute had begun using storytelling to spark interest in science. Since the 2022-23 academic session, IIT-Kanpur’s dramatics society has staged an annual play around scientists and scientific ideas.
The first production was Copenhagen, Michael Frayn’s play exploring the famous 1941 meeting between physicists Niels Bohr and Werner Heisenberg and the ethical questions surrounding nuclear science. It was followed by a production on British mathematician and computer scientist Alan Turing, whose work laid the foundations of modern computing. The most recent play drew inspiration from a Nobel Prize-winning work on DNA, using theatre to explain not just the discovery but the scientific process behind it.
“The plays are not simply biographies of scientists,” Harbola said. “They help explain what science is and how scientific ideas evolve. Nearly a thousand people from across the campus now attend these performances every year, and the audience continues to grow.”
For Harbola, the annual plays and the new comic are driven by the same philosophy: students are more likely to engage with difficult scientific ideas when they first encounter them through stories that provoke curiosity rather than through formulae alone.
