Thought X Fictions and Hypotheticals

Science is always telling stories. Whether in the creation myths of evolution or the Big Bang, or in the eureka moments of science history, narrative—just as much as metaphor—is a key tool in the scientist's surprisingly literary toolkit. Perhaps the most interesting use of story is the thought experiment, the intuition pump, that draws on the most instinctive parts of the imagination to crack otherwise perplexing problems. From Newton's Bucket and Maxwell's Demon to Einstein's Lift and Schrodinger's Cat, all are examples of "fiction" being used at the highest level, not just to explain but to deduce and to prove. In this unique anthology, authors—including Robin Ince, Sara Maitland and Adam Marek —have collaborated with leading scientists to bounce literary, human narratives against purely theoretical ones, alloying together real stories with abstract ones to produce truly extraordinary results.

Ra Page is the cofounder and editorial manager of Comma Press. He is the editor of numerous anthologies, including The City Life Book of Manchester Short Stories; Lemistry: A Celebration of the Work of Stanislaw Lem; Litmus: Short Stories from Modern Science, voted one of 2011's books of the year by the Observer; Morphologies: Short Story Writers on Short Story Writers, and the coeditor of The New Uncanny, winner of the Shirley Jackson Award in 2008. Robert Appleby is Lecturer in the high energy particle physics group and the accelerator physics group of the University of Manchester, and an academic staff member at the Cockcroft Institute of Accelerator Science. He is also an associate of the beams division at CERN (APB) and a member of the LHCb experiment. His primary research is into the physics of particle accelerators, including beam dynamics, lattice design and interactions of particles with matter, and physics at the LHC.