Thursday, June 20, 2019

Guest Commentary on "Portle"

My short story, "Portle", has just appeared in the July/August issue of AnalogI'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.

1 comment:

mythusmage said...

So what we say has to be what another says we said, because they are uncomfortable with what we did say. This explains Trump. As well as flat-earthers and creationists. More often than we'd like it's a matter of something having to be what another needs it to be, as with the creationist denying evolution, and the so called skeptic denying the sasquatch.

And why do people deny? Because admitting some things scare us. As with the Oxford Comma and friendly red foxes.