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Thought X: Fictions and Hypotheticals
Featuring leading scientists acting as consultants on the stories, and writing scientific afterwords, bringing the theory featured in the stories to life, including Prof. Sarah Bridle (Jodrell Bank), Prof. Jonathan Wolff and Prof. Frank Jackson (the inventor of the 'Mary's Room' thought experiment).
Science is always telling stories. Whether in the creation myths of evolution or the Big Bang, or in the eureka moments of science history, narrative – just as much as metaphor – is a key tool in the scientist’s surprisingly literary toolkit. Perhaps the most interesting use of story is the thought experiment, the intuition pump, that draws on the most instinctive parts of the imagination to crack otherwise perplexing problems.
From Newton's Bucket, to Maxwell’s Demon, from Einstein's Lift to Schrödinger’s Cat – all are examples of 'fiction' being used at the highest level, not just to explain, but to deduce, to prove. In this unique anthology, authors have collaborated with leading scientists, to bounce literary, human narratives against purely theoretical ones, alloying together real stories with abstract ones, to produce truly extraordinary results.
The perfect read for fans of popular science and fans of Jared Diamond, Prof. Brian Cox and Prof. Stephen Hawking.
Full list of thought experiments: The Twin Paradox, The Grandfather Paradox, Maxwell's Demon, Laplace's Demon, Mary's Room, The Chinese Room, Schrödinger's Cat, Galileo's Boat, The Infinite Monkey Typing Pool, Einstein in a Lift, Einstein Chasing a Beam of Light, Newton's Bucket, Olber's Paradox.
Science is always telling stories. Whether in the creation myths of evolution or the Big Bang, or in the eureka moments of science history, narrative – just as much as metaphor – is a key tool in the scientist’s surprisingly literary toolkit. Perhaps the most interesting use of story is the thought experiment, the intuition pump, that draws on the most instinctive parts of the imagination to crack otherwise perplexing problems.
From Newton's Bucket, to Maxwell’s Demon, from Einstein's Lift to Schrödinger’s Cat – all are examples of 'fiction' being used at the highest level, not just to explain, but to deduce, to prove. In this unique anthology, authors have collaborated with leading scientists, to bounce literary, human narratives against purely theoretical ones, alloying together real stories with abstract ones, to produce truly extraordinary results.
The perfect read for fans of popular science and fans of Jared Diamond, Prof. Brian Cox and Prof. Stephen Hawking.
Full list of thought experiments: The Twin Paradox, The Grandfather Paradox, Maxwell's Demon, Laplace's Demon, Mary's Room, The Chinese Room, Schrödinger's Cat, Galileo's Boat, The Infinite Monkey Typing Pool, Einstein in a Lift, Einstein Chasing a Beam of Light, Newton's Bucket, Olber's Paradox.
286 pages, Kindle Edition
First published August 1, 2014
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Displaying 1 - 7 of 7 reviews
September 6, 2017
One of the best stories in the collection Thought X, written by veteran SF author Ian Watson, features the old idea of monkeys on typewriters writing Shakespeare (though with a brilliant new twist). For years I've hoped for science fiction that works well both as a story and at putting science across - I was beginning to think it was as likely as those monkeys typing out Hamlet. But to my surprise and delight, Thought X absolutely fills the bill.
With one somewhat disastrous exception (I'll come to that later), every single story in this collection is both a really high quality piece of writing and superbly illustrates a 'thought experiment' - the approach beloved, for example, of Einstein, of trying out scientific or philosophical concepts in a theoretical fashion to work out what would happen. Bearing in mind that this is essentially saying 'What if?' - absolutely the role of science fiction - this seems a natural pairing with SF stories. And it is. Even better, each story is followed by a 'science bit', where a scientist or philosopher explains the original thought experiment and how it fits with the story.
I'm not going to mention every story individually, but as well as the Watson story Monkey Business that I opened with, there are so many delights here - often taking totally unexpected routes to explore a well-known thought experiment from the Chinese Room to Olber's Paradox. For example, the second story, Tether by Zoe Gilbert is a beautiful, evocative fantasy worthy of Alan Garner, which also takes on an exploration of whether a perfect simulated experience is any different from reality.
I mentioned one exception on the science side - this is the opening story, Lightspeed by Adam Marek. The story itself is well-written, though it ends rather abruptly as if it were extracted from a longer piece. But there are serious problems with the science. Usually in science fiction I would say that the 'fiction' part always has to come first and it doesn't matter if the science is more than a little mangled. But this book is explicitly about using stories to explore real scientific conundrums, so it has to be done properly.
Things start to go downhill in the book's introduction, which in talking about the story (illustrating the twins paradox of special relativity) gets wrong why there apparently should be symmetry in this time travel thought experiment (the editors say it's because time slows down on the way out and speeds up on the way back, but it actually slows down in both directions, and the apparent symmetry is because both the observer on the Earth and on the spaceship see themselves as stationary and the other as moving). The introduction then compounds the issue by saying that the explanation for this symmetry being broken (so there really is time travel) requires general relativity - where actually it's entirely within the bounds of special relativity, just harder to calculate than with the usual mathematics. Also, the story itself is wrong in portraying slowed down speech as being a big issue when receiving radio signals in a high speed ship, where actually the problems would be frequency shifts (easily fixed - my computer can do it) and time delays in conversations (not mentioned).
The reason I've gone on about this story for so long is primarily because I don't want anyone to be put off: the rest of the collection - another 13 stories - does the job so well. I can't recommend this collection highly enough: the stories are all superbly written - a great collection of writing purely taken as fiction - and but for the science errors here, do the job of illustrating the thought experiments brilliantly. So just enjoy the first story, but relish both science and fiction with all the rest. Huge kudos to Comma Press and the Institute of Physics for this one. Excellent.
With one somewhat disastrous exception (I'll come to that later), every single story in this collection is both a really high quality piece of writing and superbly illustrates a 'thought experiment' - the approach beloved, for example, of Einstein, of trying out scientific or philosophical concepts in a theoretical fashion to work out what would happen. Bearing in mind that this is essentially saying 'What if?' - absolutely the role of science fiction - this seems a natural pairing with SF stories. And it is. Even better, each story is followed by a 'science bit', where a scientist or philosopher explains the original thought experiment and how it fits with the story.
I'm not going to mention every story individually, but as well as the Watson story Monkey Business that I opened with, there are so many delights here - often taking totally unexpected routes to explore a well-known thought experiment from the Chinese Room to Olber's Paradox. For example, the second story, Tether by Zoe Gilbert is a beautiful, evocative fantasy worthy of Alan Garner, which also takes on an exploration of whether a perfect simulated experience is any different from reality.
I mentioned one exception on the science side - this is the opening story, Lightspeed by Adam Marek. The story itself is well-written, though it ends rather abruptly as if it were extracted from a longer piece. But there are serious problems with the science. Usually in science fiction I would say that the 'fiction' part always has to come first and it doesn't matter if the science is more than a little mangled. But this book is explicitly about using stories to explore real scientific conundrums, so it has to be done properly.
Things start to go downhill in the book's introduction, which in talking about the story (illustrating the twins paradox of special relativity) gets wrong why there apparently should be symmetry in this time travel thought experiment (the editors say it's because time slows down on the way out and speeds up on the way back, but it actually slows down in both directions, and the apparent symmetry is because both the observer on the Earth and on the spaceship see themselves as stationary and the other as moving). The introduction then compounds the issue by saying that the explanation for this symmetry being broken (so there really is time travel) requires general relativity - where actually it's entirely within the bounds of special relativity, just harder to calculate than with the usual mathematics. Also, the story itself is wrong in portraying slowed down speech as being a big issue when receiving radio signals in a high speed ship, where actually the problems would be frequency shifts (easily fixed - my computer can do it) and time delays in conversations (not mentioned).
The reason I've gone on about this story for so long is primarily because I don't want anyone to be put off: the rest of the collection - another 13 stories - does the job so well. I can't recommend this collection highly enough: the stories are all superbly written - a great collection of writing purely taken as fiction - and but for the science errors here, do the job of illustrating the thought experiments brilliantly. So just enjoy the first story, but relish both science and fiction with all the rest. Huge kudos to Comma Press and the Institute of Physics for this one. Excellent.
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September 3, 2017Neat concept. Short science fiction and thought experiment stories followed by scientists and researchers explaining various technical aspects of each story and discussing probability, accuracy and socio aspects of the story. Mental floss.
January 10, 2018
This is a collection of short stories, based on thought experiments in science or philosophy, each of which is followed by a few pages of expert discussion. The format brings to mind Isaac Asimov's classic "Where do we go from here" collections from way back when.
The discussion tends to be more interesting than the stories. In particular, I had not heard of "Mary's room and the knowledge experiment" before: a girl raised in a black-and-white room becomes an expert neurologist, and learns everything about the phyics, chemistry and biology of colour; and yet, when she experiences the shock of seeing the colour red for the first time, she appears to have gained some knowledge that was not included in the science of the physical world. Does this mean that subjective experience is beyond physics? It's a very difficult argument to refute, though the story's expert claims to have written an 8000-word article doing so.
The real gem amongst the stories is Ian Watson's "Monkey Business". This is an affectionate piece of whimsy, describing a world in which robot monkeys are actually randomly typing the works of Shakespeare. The whole economy is geared to supporting the monkeys with ink and paper, and the people eagerly await the one day in a gazillion years when a play will finally appear. The book is worth buying for this little story alone. I wonder what else Ian Watson has written?
The discussion tends to be more interesting than the stories. In particular, I had not heard of "Mary's room and the knowledge experiment" before: a girl raised in a black-and-white room becomes an expert neurologist, and learns everything about the phyics, chemistry and biology of colour; and yet, when she experiences the shock of seeing the colour red for the first time, she appears to have gained some knowledge that was not included in the science of the physical world. Does this mean that subjective experience is beyond physics? It's a very difficult argument to refute, though the story's expert claims to have written an 8000-word article doing so.
The real gem amongst the stories is Ian Watson's "Monkey Business". This is an affectionate piece of whimsy, describing a world in which robot monkeys are actually randomly typing the works of Shakespeare. The whole economy is geared to supporting the monkeys with ink and paper, and the people eagerly await the one day in a gazillion years when a play will finally appear. The book is worth buying for this little story alone. I wonder what else Ian Watson has written?
November 10, 2017
It is weird to tag a book as both fiction and non-fiction, but this experimental book is precisely that.
Short story collections can often be uneven, and in some ways this set was one with really high variation. Short stories also tend to throw me off sometimes because with each new story there is a different set of characters and universe to be imagined, and this collection was way too wide for me to keep pace.
I did like a couple of the actual stories, but what I truly enjoyed were the afterwords. I was familiar with some of the science but a fair bit of this was new to me. A few of the stories were quite unsatisfying and the fable-like structuring did not help me.
I would recommend this to any science enthusiast but warn that I found it a long read mainly due to constantly shifting focus.
Short story collections can often be uneven, and in some ways this set was one with really high variation. Short stories also tend to throw me off sometimes because with each new story there is a different set of characters and universe to be imagined, and this collection was way too wide for me to keep pace.
I did like a couple of the actual stories, but what I truly enjoyed were the afterwords. I was familiar with some of the science but a fair bit of this was new to me. A few of the stories were quite unsatisfying and the fable-like structuring did not help me.
I would recommend this to any science enthusiast but warn that I found it a long read mainly due to constantly shifting focus.
May 2, 2020
Good short stories based around famous thought experiments. Each one is then followed by a short essay looking at the science. Thankfully these are largely understandable to the average reader (i.e. Me), apart from the last one which somewhat went over my head!
January 14, 2018
The problem is too many of these short stories consist of nothing much happening and a description of the thought experiment the story is about rendering the stories pointless when accompanied by a further more detailed description of the thought experiment.
Good if you want to read about some interesting beaters of science
Bad if you are looking for good fiction
Good if you want to read about some interesting beaters of science
Bad if you are looking for good fiction
September 9, 2019
Interesting concept, but doesn't quite wark
Displaying 1 - 7 of 7 reviews