Even though Julius Taranto peppers physics terminology throughout his debut novel, “How I Won a Nobel Prize” is not daunting. Did my eyes sometimes skitter over the more scientific passages? Sure, but I would occasionally Google as I extracted layers of meaning in this comic tale. It straddles the present and a not-so-implausible future in pursuit of cracking high-temperature superconductivity — allowing for a sustainable global power grid and ultimately saving the planet. Cornell graduate student Helen wants in, but she knows she needs the collaboration of mentor/adviser Perry Smoot, the “S” in the ZEST model, the most comprehensive accounting of superconductivity available. When Smoot is forced to resign, he packs his bags for the Rubin Institute Plymouth (RIP) and asks Helen to follow him.

But RIP isn’t just any institute on an island in the North Atlantic: “The popular vision, at the beginning, was of an academic prison colony where the worst-behaved of great minds would live out their days, closed off from the pleasures of civilized life.” Instead, it has turned into “a libertarian, libertine dream: bottomless funding, unencumbered by institutional regulations. … It was Sandals for Scandals with tax-exempt status.”

Helen goes where she can do her best work, and the fallout of that decision — from the moment Helen and her husband clap eyes on the island — is what Taranto tracks to often hilarious effect. As they arrive at RIP, looming above everything is “an enormous, rounded beige tower.” The “throbbing center of the Institute” was “unmistakably a phallus. It was known as the Endowment.”

The ethical cost of doing business with compromised individuals is never far from Taranto’s mind. Is the outcome worth that cost? It’s no surprise the book was originally titled “The Moral Offset” and that the conclusions drawn are literally explosive.

As such, Taranto sometimes teeters on a polemic tightrope, but he avoids losing his balance as he keeps his eye on the prize.