Stories

In this course we will develop "Science of Ted Chiang" explainers in many forms.  (For 2021 we've included two non-Ted Chiang stories; students are also welcome to suggest science-fiction stories with an associated science topic.)

Each student should select one Ted Chiang short story to base their explainers on. Sample explainer articles on the relevant scientific topics are attached; students are expected to do their own additional research.

• Story of your Life (Stories of Your Life) - principle of least action

  • Feynman's Infinite Quantum Paths, PBS Space Time

  • The Principle of Least Action, Feynman Lectures on Physics

  • "The Law of Least Action," Jim Holt in When Einstein Walked with Gödel 

• Story of your Life (Stories of Your Life) - linguistic relativity

  • "How Realistic Is the Way Amy Adams’ Character Hacks the Alien Language In Arrival? We Asked a Linguist," M. Martinelli 

  • "Relearn the Linguistic World in “Arrival”: An Interview with Jessica Coon," Jiaxin Su

• Exhalation (Exhalation) - heat death of the universe

  • "The Death of Our Universe," Ella Alderson

  • "How Will the Universe End?," Jim Holt in When Einstein Walked with Gödel 

  • For those with some physics background, you can connect to to thermodynamics and steam engines.

  • One technical idea that may be useful is entropy:

    • Jeff Phillips' What Is Entropy on TedEd (video).

    • "The Misunderstood Nature of Entropy," PBS Spacetime

• Tower of Babylon (Stories of Your Life) - cosmology / celestial sphere model

  • "Ancient Greek Astronomy and Cosmology," Library of Congress

  • "What does the world of of Ted Chiang's “Tower of Babylon” actually look like?," Sci-Fi stack exchange

  • One could connect this to the cosmic microwave background, which is the signature from a "celestial sphere" that actually exists: 

    • Scientific American

    • Space.com

    • NASA: surface of last scattering

• Omphalos (Exhalation) - origin of the Earth/universe

  • "When Science Stands Up To Creationism," Barbara King

  • "An Offensive Strategy for Dealing With Creationist Attacks on Science," Dana Hunter

• Anxiety Is the Dizziness of Freedom (Exhalation) - quantum entanglement

  • "Entanglement Made Simple," Frank Wilczek

  • "Quantum Weirdness Now a Matter of Time," George Musser

  • "How Quantum Entanglement Works (Infographic)," Karl Tate 

  • "Einstein, 'Spooky Action,' and the Reality of Space", Jim Holt in When Einstein Walked with Gödel

  • "Entanglement Ball: Using Dodgeball to Introduce Quantum Entanglement," The Physics Teacher 59, 613 (2021); https://doi.org/10.1119/5.0019871

• Division by Zero (Stories of Your Life) - Godel's incompleteness theorem

  • "What is Godel's Theorem?" Melvin Henriksen

  • "The Popular Impact of Gödel’s Incompleteness Theorem," Torkel Franzen

  • "Gödel Escher Bach series — An overview of Gödel’s incompleteness theorems," Diana Darie  

  • "When Einstein Walked with Gödel," Jim Holt in When Einstein Walked with Gödel

  • Relation to Turing and the Halting Problem, via towardsdatascience

• The Truth of Fact, the Truth of Feeling (Exhalation) - 

  • "Oral Cultures and Early Writing," Walter Ong (via)

  • "The Technology of Memory," James Poulos

  • "How to avoid losing your memory in the digital age," Daniel Lavelle 

  • "Is Google Making Us Stupid?" Nicholas Carr, The Atlantic, 2008

  • "Smarter, Happier, More Productive," Jim Holt in When Einstein Walked with Godel

• The Merchant and the Alchemist's Gate (Exhalation) - worm holes

  • "How to Build a Time Machine," Paul Davies

  • "Time Travel and Wormholes: Physicist Kip Thorne's Wildest Theories," Calla Cofield 

• The Great Silence (Exhalation) - environmentalism, intelligence

  • "The Great Silence" performance

  • "‘Are We Smart Enough to Know How Smart Animals Are?’ and ‘The Genius of Birds," Jon Mooallem

  • ""Are We Smart Enough to Know How Smart Animals Are?"," Marc Beckoff (book review)

  • "Arecibo Observatory: Watching for Asteroids, Waiting for E.T.," Elizabeth Howell

  • Excerpt from The Disordered Cosmos by Chanda Prescod Weinstein on colonialism in science

  • Mia De Los Reyes on TMT and decolonializing science

    • The connection between the Arecibo Observatory (and what it represents) in The Great Silence and the ongoing debate about building the Thirty Meter Telescope on Mauna Kea (sacred land for the native Hawaiians) may be a powerful connection.

  • One possible theme are different kinds of 'wisdom' and whether we value them within a given "modern" frame of thought (e.g. modern science, modern economic systems). One can connect this to the human scale (see, e.g. the selection from The Disordered Cosmos).

• What's Expected of Us (Exhalation) - time travel and free will

  • "On Determinism," Sean Carroll

  • "Free Will, Determinism, Quantum Theory, and Statistical Physics, A Physicist's Take," Carlo Rovelli

• [new for 2021] Selections from World War Z by Max Brooks

  • "How The Government Can Mobilize in a Pandemic," Fresh Air interview with Max Brooks, March 24, 2020; interview highlights

  • "Teaching Pandemics Syllabus," Catherine Halley, JSTOR Daily, April 6, 2020.

• [new for 2021] Bitcoin

  • Story option 1: "The Baker of Mars," Karl Schroeder. [online]

  • Story option 2: "Byzantine Empathy," Ken Liu. Originally published in Twelve Tomorrows, edited by Wade Roush. Reproduced in Lightspeed magazine and The Hidden Girl and Other Stories (an excellent collection -Prof. Tanedo). 

  • "Speculating on the Blockchain Beyond Cryptocurrencies," Andrew Hageman, Feb 20, 2019. Discussion of the stories in the LA Review of Books

  • "But how does bitcoin actually work?" 3Blue1Brown, YouTube, 7 July 2017.

  • "Bitcoin Uses More Electricity Than Many Countries. How Is That Possible?," New York Times, Sept 3 2021.

  • "Why Bitcoin is Bad for the Environment," Elizabeth Kolbert, The New Yorker (Daily Comment), 22 April 2021. 

• [new for 2021]: "Different Kinds of Darkness," David Langford

  • LeVar Burton Reads narration

  • "Is Google Making Us Stupid?" Nicholas Carr, The Atlantic, 2008

  • "Smarter, Happier, More Productive," Jim Holt in When Einstein Walked with Godel

  • Other possible ideas: misinformation on social media, advertising on websites (and ad blockers)

• [added later]: "Garden of Forking Paths" Jorge Luis Borges

• Stories suggested by students:

  • Slaughterhouse Five, Vonnegut

  • Interstellar

    • connection to the Event Horizon Telescope