It’s always kind of interesting to find the parts of science fiction in which fictional sciences are discussed. Here are a couple of my favorites that come to mind:

Shevek’s work in Ursula K. Le Guin’s The Dispossessed, specifically his “General Temporal Theory.” He attempts to tie a physics of time to philosophy and ethics:

The Anarresti hoped to restore the fertility of that restless earth by replanting the forest. This was, Shevek thought, in accordance with the principle of Causative Reversibility, ignored by the Sequency school of physics currently respectable on Anarres, but still an intimate, tacit element of Odonian thought. He would like to write a paper showing the relationship of Odo’s ideas to the ideas of temporal physics, and particularly the influence of Causative Reversibility on her handling of the problem of ends and means.

Next up is Hamid Parsani’s study of the “Telluro-Magnetic Conspiracy Towards the Sun” in Reza Negarestani’s Cyclonopedia:

An essayist in Cyclonopedia writes:

For a long time now the magnetosphere, this ultra-ancient cocoon around the planetary body, has enriched the earth’s tellurian insurgency, telling the earth forbidden stories from the Outside, teaching it how to reach immanence with the Sun, and ultimately completing the hatching process of its inner black Egg, or the treacherous Insider. In Tellurian Insurgency, everything—whether stratified or not—assists the earth in hatching its xeno-chemical Insider.

Finally, as the second part of Stanisław Lem’s Imaginary Magnitude, is the introduction to fictional author Reginald Gulliver’s Eruntics—a work on bacterial linguistics:

The biochemical action of Gulliveria coli prophetissima behaves then as a transmitter linking various space-time intervals. Bacteria are a hypersensitive receiver of certain likelihoods, and nothing more. Bacterial futurology has admittedly become a reality, though it is fundamentally unpredictable in its consequences, since the future-tracking behavior of bacteria cannot be controlled.

This kind of inventive science can be fun to think about. I think it kind of influenced my input on the Data and Algorithm projects.