Chiang is a master of hard science fiction. He weaves amazing tales in the most realistic of manners. The first story, “The Merchant and the Alchemist’s Gate,” embeds multiple stories about time travel within each other. Chiang was inspired by physicist Kip Thorne. He writes of the initial idea, “you could—in theory—create a time machine that obeyed Einstein’s theory of relativity…. Thorne had performed some mathematical analysis indicating that you couldn’t change the past with this time machine, and that only a single, self-consistent timeline was possible.” A character in the story sums it up, “Past and future are the same, and we cannot change either, only know them more fully. My journey to the past had changed nothing, but what I had learned had changed everything, and I understood that it could not have been otherwise.”
In the title story, “Exhalation,” Chiang plays with the idea of entropy. In his notes, he explains, “The conservation of energy means that it is neither created nor destroyed; we are radiating energy constantly, at pretty much the same rate that we absorb it. The difference is that the heat energy we radiate is a high-entropy form of energy, meaning it’s disordered. The chemical energy we absorb is a low-entropy form of energy, meaning it’s ordered. In effect, we are consuming order and generating disorder.” In the story, the narrator leaves a note to the future, “I wish you well, explorer, but I wonder: Does the same fate that befell me await you? I can only imagine that it must, that the tendency toward equilibrium is not a trait peculiar to our universe but inherent in all universes.”
In “Omphalos” Chiang plays with an alternate reality in which a kind of creationism is still commonly believed. Chiang writes, “Much of modern astronomy is premised on the Copernican principle, the idea that we are not at the center of the universe and are not observing it from a privileged position; this is pretty much the opposite of young-earth creationism.” The narrator is an archaeologist who has been able to reconcile her science with her religion holistically. She relates, “Free will is a kind of miracle; when we make a genuine choice, we bring about a result that cannot be reduced to the workings of physical law. Every act of volition is, like the creation of the universe, a first cause.”
In the title story, “Exhalation,” Chiang plays with the idea of entropy. In his notes, he explains, “The conservation of energy means that it is neither created nor destroyed; we are radiating energy constantly, at pretty much the same rate that we absorb it. The difference is that the heat energy we radiate is a high-entropy form of energy, meaning it’s disordered. The chemical energy we absorb is a low-entropy form of energy, meaning it’s ordered. In effect, we are consuming order and generating disorder.” In the story, the narrator leaves a note to the future, “I wish you well, explorer, but I wonder: Does the same fate that befell me await you? I can only imagine that it must, that the tendency toward equilibrium is not a trait peculiar to our universe but inherent in all universes.”
In “Omphalos” Chiang plays with an alternate reality in which a kind of creationism is still commonly believed. Chiang writes, “Much of modern astronomy is premised on the Copernican principle, the idea that we are not at the center of the universe and are not observing it from a privileged position; this is pretty much the opposite of young-earth creationism.” The narrator is an archaeologist who has been able to reconcile her science with her religion holistically. She relates, “Free will is a kind of miracle; when we make a genuine choice, we bring about a result that cannot be reduced to the workings of physical law. Every act of volition is, like the creation of the universe, a first cause.”
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