Blood-Brain Barrier: Stories from the Borderlands of Science, part two. Light Apparel

This collection of short stories by Stan Rice, who is also the author of nonfiction books of popular science and science novels, takes the reader to the frontier between science and worlds of the impossible. Readers of my science blog will appreciate the creative telling of scientifically impossible stories; readers of my religion blog will appreciate the question of whether, even if these things were possible, would they be good?

The stories in this collection are The Man Who Could Work Miracles (reviewed earlier), Light Apparel, Flow of Blood, Wisdom Builds Her House, Rock Bunnies, Entropy, Olga the Science Cat, Doghouse, and Fresh Air.

 

In Light Apparel, a physicist, Hadley, discovers how to weave light into a fabric from which clothing could be made. People could now go naked but look like they were clothed, and this was very popular in a globally-warmed world. At least they appeared clothed to everyone except Hadley; he could use his equations to make spectacles that could unscramble the light and reveal their nakedness. Hadley lived in an endless fantasy world.

The only person who rejected this light-apparel was a young Christian woman, Xan, who wore cloth. She stood out among the naked bodies as surely as if she were the only naked person. Hadley was attracted to her, as she tried to save his soul. But her parents sneaked into his room and stole his secrets. The father was ready to destroy Hadley’s financial empire, until Xan shoots her father.

The question that this story raises—but does not answer, since it is just a story—is, why do humans wear clothing? Is it for modesty? Is it to curb unbridled sexual lust? You can think of an almost limitless number of reasons these cannot be the reasons. Some tribes and nudists manage to have modesty despite nakedness. Instead, from an evolutionary biology viewpoint, clothes are power, sometimes hiding, sometimes revealing, sometimes emphasizing, what people want others to see. In the history of every culture, clothing is much too complicated and ornate to simply serve as a covering against nakedness or to keep warm. Clothing is a product of cultural evolution in our species of otherwise naked apes.