Thought X

Ian Watson

Description

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 Schrodinger'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. 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).

Sujets

• Short story
• Science fiction

Informations

• Publié par: Comma Press
• Date de parution: 20 avril 2017
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781910974575
• Langue: English
• Poids de l'ouvrage: 2 Mo

Extrait

First published in Great Britain in 2017 by Comma Press.
www.commapress.co.uk
Copyright © remains with the authors, scientists and philosophers 2017.
All rights reserved.


The moral rights of the contributors to be identified as the authors of this Work have been asserted in accordance with the Copyright Designs and Patents Act 1988.
The stories in this anthology (excluding the ‘afterwords’) are entirely works of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in them are entirely the work of the authors’ imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, organisations or localities, is entirely coincidental. Any characters that appear, or claim to be based on real ones are intended to be entirely fictional.
The opinions of the authors and the scientists are not those of the publisher.
A CIP catalogue record of this book is available from the British Library.

This project has been developed through two seperate grants from the Institute of Physics in 2013 and 2015.



The publisher gratefully acknowledges assistance from Arts Council England.
Contents
Introduction
Rob Appleby & Ra Page

Lightspeed by Adam Marek
Afterword: The Twin Paradox

Tether by Zoe Gilbert
Afterword: The Experience Machine

The Tiniest Atom by Sarah Schofield
Afterword: Laplace’s Demon

Red by Annie Kirby
Afterword: Mary’s Room and the Knowledge Argument

XOR by Andy Hedgecock
Afterword: The Grandfather Paradox

Bright Boy by Marie Louise Cookson
Afterword: Maxwell’s Demon

The Rooms by Annie Clarkson
Afterword: The Chinese Room

If He Wakes by Margaret Wilkinson
Afterword: Schrödinger’s Cat

People Watching by Claire Dean
Afterword: Galileo’s Ship

Monkey Business by Ian Watson
Afterword: The Infinite Monkey Typing Pool

Equivalence by Sandra Alland
Afterword: Einstein in a Lift

The Child in the Lock by Robin Ince
Afterword: The Spider in the Urinal & The Drowning Child

Keep It Dark by Adam Roberts
Afterword: Olbers’ Paradox

Inertia by Anneliese Mackintosh
Afterword: Chasing a Beam of Light

About the Authors
About the Scientists & Philosophers
Introduction
This is a book about thought experiments in science and philosophy, and the way thought experiments have been used to poke holes in prevailing theories, or suggest limits to new ones. More specifically, it is about the stories these thought experiments tell – the unlikely scenarios they set up and the creative lengths they go to, often reaching blindly in the dark – to prove a hunch, that there’s something wrong with our current thinking. The book will also explore how these peculiar ‘short stories’ of science and philosophy compare to their literary counterparts, what commonalities they share, and how they might illuminate each other.
So what is a thought experiment, exactly? The philosopher Andrew Irvine suggests the following definition:

‘A thought experiment is an instance of reasoning which attempts to draw a conclusion about how the world either is or could be by positing some hypothetical, or perhaps even counterfactual, state of affairs.’ 1

The science writer Martin Cohen offers a more succinct phrase for this process – ‘armchair philosophy’ 2 . Indeed, we might expand this to ‘armchair philosophy and science ’. If the thought experiment is a successful one, by definition, there is no need to actually get out of one’s armchair and conduct it in a real life laboratory or anywhere; the imagination’s proof is enough.
The phrase ‘thought experiment’ (or ‘Gedankenexperiment’) was originally coined by the Austrian physicist Ernst Mach (1838-1916), who believed certain conclusions could be made without experiment, by all of us, by simply conceiving a scenario and then rejecting it for not complying with what he called our shared ‘instinctive knowledge’ 3 . Mach has a more poetic description of this ‘instinctive knowledge’ than anyone:
‘Just as when the stroking of a clock has discontinued, we are still able to count the strokes in our memory; [Just as] we can still perceive in the afterimage of a lamp, details which escaped immediate observation; we can, in recollecting, discover a feature which suddenly unveils for us the previously misunderstood character of a person. Similarly, in our recollection, we can discover new properties about physical facts which for a long time went unnoticed.’ 4
It doesn’t sound very scientific, does it? Merely thinking about a theory can, according to Mach, lead to new insights and new developments in our understanding of the world. Sometimes, perhaps, that’s all scientists can do. As Ernest Rutherford once quipped, ‘We’ve got no money, so we’ve got to think.’ 5
To understand how a thought experiment is constructed, let’s take one of the earliest known examples: the Leaning Tower of Pisa thought experiment. Devised by Galileo, this took the existing belief (proposed by Aristotle) that heavy things fall faster than light things, and proved this theory to be false, everywhere, in principle. He did this by imagining an experiment that involved dropping things from the Leaning Tower of Pisa (an experiment which, as far as we know, he never actually conducted). If heavy things fall faster, then imagine tying a heavy object, let’s say a cannonball, to a light object, let’s say a musket ball, with a string. Drop them both together. Considering the cannonball, musket ball, and string as one system, the system is heavier than just the cannonball, so as a whole, according to Aristotle, it should fall faster than just a cannonball. But consider each constituent part individually. The musket ball, according to Aristotle, is inclined to fall slower than the cannonball, so it would drag the cannonball back, slowing it down, thus making the system as a whole fall slower. So we have a paradox. Both can’t be true, so Aristotle’s theory can be rejected as false.
This ‘deductive’ thought experiment, is the strongest type. It sets up a reasonable situation where the original theory produces a logical paradox, in principle, everywhere. Something can’t be true and not true, so the original theory has to be rejected. (Interestingly, Galileo conceived this argument to counter the many occasions in nature where lighter things do fall slower than heavier ones – a feather compared to a stone, let’s say – because of what we now know is air resistance. To distinguish the two, Galileo had to divide all possible causes into two types: fundamental ‘phenomena’, or ‘laws’ as Newton would later call them; and ‘accidents’, by which he meant interference factors that get in the way of seeing these fundamental laws – a distinction that at the time took an enormous leap of faith).
There is a second, softer type of thought experiment, examples of which merely try to demonstrate something is missing in the current theory. We might call these ‘limiting’ thought experiments. The famous Twin Paradox, explored by the first story in this book (and which ironically isn’t a paradox), belongs in this category. It points out a lack of symmetry in Special Relativity, producing an intuitive sense that something is missing. If the timeframe inside a very fast moving spaceship appears to be slowed down (relative to us), when it’s moving away from us, and sped up (relative to us) when it’s coming back and moving towards us, then surely everything will even out, for the travelling twin, in the thought experiment, who performs a ‘round trip’ there and back?
As Adam Marek’s story ‘Lightspeed’ (pp.1-17) demonstrates, this isn’t the case; the travelling character doesn’t age as much as those he left behind, time has definitely moved slower for him. So where is the asymmetry coming from? Why can’t we say, ‘The stationary family are also moving – away and then back again – relative to the travelling pilot’? An asymmetry is needed here, and to introduce it (and fully explain it) Einstein had to develop a second theory, General Relativity, which included the all important component, acceleration – the one property of the travelling twin’s timeframe that distinguishes it from the stationary twin’s.
What the Twin Paradox does here is show that there is a ‘back wall’ to Special Relativity, a point where a new theory, or at least an extension to the existing one, needs to be built.
Another example of a ‘limiting’ thought experiment, although not a successful one, is Maxwell’s Demon (pp.97-112). The Second Law of Thermodynamics says, among other things, that if you put a hot cloud of gas beside a cold one, heat will travel from the hot to the cold; heat will eventually ‘even out’. The Maxwell’s Demon thought experiment speculates about the possibility of a tiny monster (or nanobot) opening and shutting a tiny door in a wall between a hot and cold gas, only letting colder-than-average particles in the hot gas, and hotter-than-average particles in the cold gas pass to the other side, thus making heat move in the wrong direction . Here we see the creative mind of the scientist in full flow, inventing very elaborate and unlikely scenarios, simply to deliver pot-shots at an existing theory. What drives the scientists behind these ideas to such imaginative lengths? Professional envy? Innate belligerence? Or perhaps it’s just the same dogged curiosity, the impulse to test, test and test again, that drives all scientists in all aspects of their work. Even in the absence of technology or funding to do ‘real world’ experimentation, test they still must, if only in the mind.
There is perhaps a third type of thought experiment – let’s call it the ‘intuitional’ thought experiment – that doesn’t condemn a theory altogether, or call for an extension, but raises the suspicion that it’s conceptually incomplete. A very famous example of this is Schrödinger’s Cat (pp.139-158). Quantum Mechanics says that, at a microscopic level, things behave very strangely; subatomic particles, like electrons, c