An excerpt from a recent Aeon article by Joshua Roebke about literature and science:
The goal of physics is to understand the Universe at every scale, to know the vast but finite potential of all that we and our instruments may observe. The method of physics is to contort what is materially possible until we can shape it no more.
To know the world is to enumerate its possibilities. Physics thus demarcates the impossible, the infinite potential of universes not our own.
Fiction is our laboratory for the impossibilities that exceed our Universe, the infinity that casts limited reality in greater relief. Such impossibilities are also of the world because they are within us, because they move us, because they embolden or cower us. We never experience them directly, not really, not physically, but they enlarge humanity nonetheless. We may be confined by the possible, but we are citizens of the unreal.
Physics asks simple questions: it asks the possible. Fiction asks the hardest from us, the impossible. To know the world, we need both.
Experimentation, in both physics and fiction, is the asking of questions. It is not, however, the answering. No experiment can decide knowledge once and for all. Uncertainty always remains. There can be, in other words, no end to our experiments, no end to our imaginations, in either fiction or physics.
One of the authors that Roebke discusses is Jorge Luis Boris.
I’ve long been a fan of Borges, and realized that he occupies the same conceptual space in my mind as sci-fi authors do, even though he doesn't write science fiction per se.
I've struggled to understand exactly why that is — why I think of him as a science fiction author when he doesn’t actually write in the genre, mostly sticking to speculative, dreamy short stories instead — and I think this theory of fiction as a laboratory explains it well.
Borges, like most sci-fi authors I read, is always proposing new thought experiments. Though his writing is in narrative form, with characters and settings and dialogue, it’d be equally at home in a late-night conversation at a bar, preceded by “What if…,” and going on to imagine some inversion of reality as we know it.
And, as Roebke notes, these are always questions rather than answers: “No experiment can decide knowledge once and for all.”
Just like science, fiction shouldn’t satiate our curiosity, but reignite it. Borges does a great job with this.