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Riffing on Strings
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Editorial Reviews
Amanda Gefter, New Scientist, July 16, 2008
WHAT first drew me to physics were the words. Cosmos. Entanglement. Spiralling galaxies and stars gone supernova, dark matter and charmed quarks. Physics brims with linguistic magic. And once you peer beneath the words, you find ideas can possess a poetry more poignant than any turn of phrase. String theory may turn out to be wrong. It might not be testable and it might not describe the real world. But it does describe a world that's undeniably poetic.
WHAT first drew me to physics were the words. Cosmos. Entanglement. Spiralling galaxies and stars gone supernova, dark matter and charmed quarks. Physics brims with linguistic magic. And once you peer beneath the words, you find ideas can possess a poetry more poignant than any turn of phrase. String theory may turn out to be wrong. It might not be testable and it might not describe the real world. But it does describe a world that's undeniably poetic.
Still, I'll admit, when I picked up Riffing on Strings I was sceptical. Sure, the poetic building blocks are there, but creative writing and string theory? It's got the potential to go horribly awry. So I was pleased to find such an eclectic, thought-provoking and entertaining collection of writing - perfect for toting along on travels in other dimensions. The book opens with Sean Miller's introduction to string theory and its place in the arts, followed by a series of essays by acclaimed physicists. Michio Kaku's piece on duality is especially informative. Then come short stories, poems and plays that show the myriad ways in which physics seeps into public consciousness, is absorbed by the artist and re-emitted as something entirely new. These are pieces inspired by string theory, not about it. It's not a matter of whether the writers get the science right, it's how they play with it.
When it comes to string theory, people either love it or hate it. Some writers draw on the beauty of the theory, others, the absurdity. In "S-Bomb", Adam Roberts imagines a world haunted by the string-theory version of an atomic bomb, a weapon capable of unravelling the fabric of reality. Jarvis Slacks, in "Like Marriage", conjures a world in which people can opt out of life by walking into a "dome", an object akin to a peaceful black hole. Despite the bizarre premise, it becomes clear that life in a world chock-full of domes isn't any different from life as we know it: we can ultimately choose to live life or to head for the nearest black hole.
Some pieces are amusingly snide. In his poem "String Theory", Dave Morrison writes: "When my friends and I considered/such possibilities behind the/cafeteria with a nickel bag of/lame weed, it did not occur/to us that we were budding physicists". On the idea of a world made of tiny strings, Robert Borski writes, "God as a boy must have been/a strange child, if not actually gifted." Imagining a future in which string theory is the accepted theory of everything, Bruce Holland Rogers tells u