Guest Commentary on "Portle"

My short story, "Portle", has just appeared in the July/August issue of Analog.  I'll have a blog post about the story at the Analog website soon, but in the meantime I have this comment about the story from Adrian Melott, a fellow cosmologist (and collaborator) at the University of Kansas, to share:

In the spirit of literary criticism, this is the meaning of your story, which is a parable about physicists. It is true because I say it is, whether you intended it or not. By writing about it, I will make sure that everyone thinks of it this way.

Physicists couldn't tolerate the grandiose vision implied by the many-worlds understanding of quantum mechanics. Retreating from this, they narrowed their consciousness. This is called "collapse of the wave function". What happened to the little girl is a metaphor for the Copenhagen Interpretation.