Last week, I wrote a scene in which Marnie, on her deathbed, describes the superstability conjecture and makes a tantalizing claim about her progress towards resolving the conjecture.
After drafting the scene, I thought I should do some fact-checking on the process of dying to make sure I was representing it correctly. I realized quickly from this Atlantic article on last words that the deathbed monologue I had given the octogenarian Marnie was not at all realistic. I would have to cut her speech down, which meant I would need to introduce the idea of superstability earlier.
The more I thought about superstability, the more I liked it. The question of superstability touches all the most interesting philosophical questions raised by Life: questions of causality, agency, identity, etc. I began to think about framing the entire story — really, the entire life of the main character — around a quest to resolve the superstability conjecture. A character whose environment was unstable might reasonably be drawn to — even obsessed with — superstability.
The upshot is this: I have a new main character! Say goodbye to Marnie (for now, at least), and hello to Mira!
Where Marnie was an only child whose mathematical explorations were lovingly supported by her single mother, Mira is the second-oldest of five children, her family moves frequently, and her parents have little time or energy to invest in supporting her interests. Like Marnie, she loves math. Unlike Marnie, she struggles to find quiet time to think through mathematical questions, and she longs for stability and autonomy.
Marnie’s story offered a way to humanize Life by placing it in the context of the mother-daughter relationship. Despite the change of characters, humanizing Life is still a major goal of this project. I hope Mira’s story will also offer greater scope to explore the philosophical significance of Life.
Here’s the new, short, scene I’ve written to introduce Mira to the idea of superstability (I call it “resilience” in the story). The year is 1971; Mira learned about Life the year before via Martin Gardner’s Scientific American column (I’ll have to adapt the Marnie-and-Mom cafeteria scene I shared in the first week of this newsletter to Mira’s story). Over the intervening months, she has played with Life and discovered some new patterns. Recently, she sent Gardner a letter describing some of her findings. In this scene, she receives Gardner’s reply to her letter.
Mira walked Gloria and Diego home from school. When they got home, there was a letter waiting for her. She stood for a minute, thinking about it.
Diego tugged her hand. “Let’s go inside. I’m hungry.”
As soon as she had poured cereal and milk and set the bowls in front of Gloria and Diego, Mira retreated to the room she shared with Gloria, slit the envelope and unfolded the letter. The terse, typewritten reply began: “Mira Álvarez: Thanks for your letter. It was very clever of you to have discovered those results, even if you rediscovered what was already known.”
Mira paused, momentarily dizzied by the mingled pleasure and disappointment of Gardner’s faint praise, then continued reading.
”The period-5 oscillator that you find is reproduced, for example, in the first edition of Robert Wainwright’s LIFELINE newsletter, published earlier this year, and in…”
She skipped ahead.
“Conway recently brought to my attention a problem which may interest you (I do not have space to discuss it in the column). He defines a resilient pattern as one which, if it appears once on the board, is guaranteed to reappear (either in the same place, or somewhere else) at some later time, regardless of what else is happening on the board. Conway’s question is: do any such patterns exist?”
With that, the letter ended abruptly with a ballpoint signature: “Best, Martin Gardner.”
Mira read the last paragraph, the one about resilience, a second, then a third time. Then, thoughtfully, she folded the letter, replaced it in its envelope, and slipped it under her pillow.
Martin Gardner, the science writer whose October 1970 Mathematical Games column in Scientific American introduced Life to the world, corresponded extensively with his readers. His first Life column alone reportedly provoked more than 150 letters.
I was in the Bay Area for a week earlier this year and had an opportunity to do research in Martin Gardner’s archives at Stanford University. Gardner’s response to Mira’s letter is based on a response he sent to a reader in 1976, a response I found while combing through the archives.
Correspondence from the Martin Gardner papers at Stanford University.
The scenes I’ve written so far have been very teachy — more about explaining bits of math (“smuggling” it into the fiction) than about developing character or setting or advancing the plot.
Over the coming week, I’d like to shift focus away from these teachy bits and towards more character and plot development. Stay tuned for more on this in next week’s update!
Thanks for reading,
Justin