Fiction as a thought experiment
The final event I went to at this year's Ilkley Literature Festival was another Comma Press one. For a few years they've had a project where a writer gets paired with a scientist: the scientist briefs the writer on a particular topic, the writer writes their story which is somehow linked to it, and the scientist then provides an afterword. The latest anthology of these stories (due out next month) is called Thought X, and is concerned with thought experiments.
Having spent a total of 9 years at 3 universities immersed in maths and theoretical physics, I hadn't realised that thought experiments were anything other than an everyday matter or that the concept might be unfamiliar to people (I can't think why people complain about academia being disconnected from the real world...). There are a variety of different sorts of thought experiment, some just an 'imagine you have a...' to get people to grasp a concept, others that either stop you from having to do an experiment (because you've worked it through logically via your imagined scenario) or that highlight a flaw in a theory by showing that there would be some contradiction if you thought your way through it in this case.
We heard extracts from three of the stories respectively based on the grandfather paradox in time travel, Laplace's demon, and Schrödinger's cat. Each thought experiment gave the author an existing narrative (e.g. there had to be an element of time travel and it had to involve some version of killing your own grandfather) around which to base their own narrative. Each of the three stories were different in tone and setting, and it sounds like it should be an interesting book.
To follow the readings, Professor Steven French of the University of Leeds (coincidentally Mark the artist's academic grandfather i.e. his PhD supervisor's PhD supervisor) talked about the importance of thought experiments in science, the history of Schrödinger's famous cat and the many-worlds theories of quantum mechanics, as well as literature as a thought experiment. Which made me think science fiction is almost always explicitly a thought experiment - what happens if we increase global temperatures, what happens if there's a scarcity of resources, what happens if we develop this technology? A good cue to go write some.