This is what Chiang does best: take an idea which might hold no scientific credibility, and then engage with it in a glacially logical fashion till it encounters a problem and ends up disproving itself. But where Chiang sets himself apart is in his choice of the problem that he encounters, which is in keeping with the logic of his created universe, and not our own. Take Omphalos, for example, a story about Young Earth creationism. In it, a scientist in a world where creationism is the normative belief system and not the Big Bang or even Darwinism, realizes in a series of gently alarming developments, that Earth wasn't God's big plan, and that even if there is a purpose to the universe, we human beings aren't it. Chiang's great revelation in the story might easily have been the discovery of the evolutionary principle. But instead, he takes creationism seriously, which entails him agreeing to the idea that there is a creator figure who did create everything from scratch one day and everything else was left to their own devices afterwards. This is the central principle of science fiction that never fails to astound me to this day: not the intrusion of the reality principle in a deluded alternate universe, but the intrusion of its own extrapolative conclusion, which acts as its own undoing. But what redeems Chiang's characters, and in this he is clearly echoing Wolfe, is the idea that despite such a radical upheaval of one's understanding of the universe, there is still something worthwhile in the perseverance of the scientific method. Finding the truth is its own reward, even if it steers you towards the unthinkable.
