| A postdoc who perceives reality different than other people (he sees something like the Platonic ideals people ought to be) works with a professor on combining chaos theory with particle physics. I'm not sure how these three ideas fit together, but in the end it works pretty well!
The author has explained that she is "math-impaired", and so it is not surprising that some of the math is not quite right. (Her description of strange attractors is way off base, and the Feigenbaum constant is something specific to logistic-like dynamical systems and not some sort of general phenomenon associated to chaotic systems as she suggests.) But, some of the math is right, and even the stuff that isn't feels basically right if you don't think about it too much.
There are also a number of scenes in which the postdoc is doing a terrible job of teaching an undergraduate class which may be of interest to visitors to this site.
Originally appeared in Omni (Winter 1995) and now available at GoogleBooks.
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