Sir

In his Words essay “Where might it lead?” (Nature 414, 399; 2001), Gregory Benford suggests how fiction can illuminate science. I agree that when a great writer weaves scientific concepts into his or her story, the reader is more likely to be drawn more deeply into the author's creation. I know of no other works of literature that marry the passions of science and unrequited love as eloquently as Umberto Eco's The Island of the Day Before.

Consider also some prose from Wallace Stegner's Pulitzer prizewinning 1971 novel Angle of Repose: “Many years later, when she reported that evening in her reminiscences, she was hearing the Doppler Effect of time, as I am now ... I think I hear the same tone, or tones, that she did: the sound of the future coming on for the girl of twenty-one, the darker sound of the past receding for the woman of eighty-four”, and later, “now I, Ahab, dismasted and with tunnel vision, seeing the back of my own head through the curved lens of space-time”. One can ponder the parallels between the significance of the title of the book and the concept of 'angle of repose' in the theory of Per Bak and collaborators describing the self-organized critical state of complex systems.

As an illustration of Benford's assertion that fiction informs science, Peter Atkins's The Periodic Kingdom is required reading in my honours chemistry class, as is a creative writing assignment based on this book's format (necessarily fiction). Although it is initially perceived as an odd assignment, I hope to infect web-surfing, computer-gaming students with an appreciation for literary science and fiction.