n his 1967 short story “The Southern Thruway,” Argentine writer Julio Cortázar conjures a catastrophic traffic jam just outside of Paris. The gridlock endures for months, forcing motorists to build an entirely new society around their immobile cars. It is a thought that has perhaps crossed many people’s minds as they are stuck in seemingly interminable traffic: .
.. Cortázar’s 20th-century fiction often played in the realm of the fantastical as a way of probing the deeper truths about existence.
In a series of lectures delivered in 1980 at the University of California, Berkeley, Cortázar explained that, in his work, “the fantastic is at the service of reality.” He continued: The fantasy, the fantastic, the imaginable that I love and with which I have tried to make my own work is everything that ultimately serves to project more clearly and with more strength the reality that surrounds us. Dabbling in the fantastic might seem natural for a fiction writer—but at sharp odds with science.
It turns out, however, that fantasy may play a similarly useful role in illuminating the darkest and most mysterious corners of science, including seemingly inaccessible regions, such as the study of energy within black holes. Such fantasies—like Cortázar’s epic traffic jam—are actually a very useful form of thought experiment. .
.. In physics, thought experiments have proven invaluable over the centuries for exposing weaknesses in existing theories and generating new i.