Book Review
Stories of Your Life and Others
by Ted Chiang
The movie “Arrival” is an adaptation of Ted Chiang’s novella “Story of Your Life.” It’s one story in this collection. In both versions, aliens appear on Earth. The US government recruits two scientists to try to communicate with them: a physicist and a linguist. The physicist tries to speak to them with math, but fails. The linguist succeeds.
It’s a clever twist. Carl Sagan famously predicted that the way to communicate would be to start from basic physical and mathematical principles. He helped put together the Voyager Golden Records, and later wrote the novel “Contact.” But what if he was wrong?
The novella version of “Story of Your Life” takes that twist one turn further. What if our models of math and physics are subjective and human-centric? Chiang’s aliens have an entirely different model of the physical universe that’s just as true. What if linguistics turns out to be a more objective description of the universe than math?
This demonstrates a common theme in Chiang’s short science fiction. We have this taxonomy of what science is and how we organize it into disciplines. Chiang imagines inventions that blurs the line between those disciplines, or upends them completely.
In one story, the Babylonians develop architecture to the level that they build a tower higher than the moon that reshapes their astronomy. In another, neurology becomes so advanced that makeup companies know how to directly tap into the region of the brain that recognizes beauty. Cosmetics become so potent that we develop brain implants to disable it. In yet another, Hell and Heaven are real places that we can observe.
Let me tell you a short story of my own.
This was in college. It must have been early because I hadn’t chosen a major yet. My friend Jeeves and I were eating lunch. Jeeves was a math major. We were discussing dimensions, as one does.
“Wait!” Jeeves said. “How are you defining ‘dimension’?”
It’s the number of directions a shape “goes” in, I replied. A line goes in one direction, a square goes in two directions, etc.
Jeeves said: let me show you something cool. Suppose you define a dimension differently. I give you an object that takes up V volume. Double the length of every side. Then the doubled object must take up V * (2^n) volume for some value n. Define n as the dimension of the object.
Doubling a line takes 2x as much space, so it has one dimension. Doubling a square takes 4x as much space, so it has two dimensions. Doubling a cube takes 8x as much space, so it has three dimensions. n = log₂ V_doubled / V
But if you start using this new definition of “dimension”, crazy things start happening. Consider a Sierpinski triangle, which recurses infinitely.
By the first definition of dimension, this shape goes in 2 directions, so it should be 2-dimensional.
But notice that if you take one of the sub-triangles, and you double each side, you get the big triangle. The big triangle has 3 of the sub-triangles. This means that if you double the shape, it takes 3 times as much space. By the second definition of dimension, this is a “log₂ 3”-dimensional shape, or about 1.58 dimensions?!?!
And that’s the best way I can describe what it’s like to read Ted Chiang’s short stories.
