Portrait of the Artist as a Young God
This first appeared in ASCENTS OF WONDER, 1977.
So what if you can make stars explode or change the orbits of elemental electrons. Big deal! It may all be very pretty, but is it Art?.
The electrons spun madly, and 227 was having trouble maneuvering them all. No one had ever handled anything as high as astatine before, and there were eighty-five of the little buggers to worry about. He forced himself to slow down and avoid the panic building inside him. No need to worry, he told himself. It’s a simple application of Schroedinger’s Equation in configuration space. It’s just that there are a lot more of them to deal with, that’s all.
It was the time variable that always bothered him. Space he had mastered easily, but of course the Heisenbergian implic
