What would happen if one small part of the universe could be isolated completely from the rest? In this story a team of physicists invent such a machine and then proceed to disappear one by one.

This story draws on at least two separate strands of inspiration. On the one hand I wanted to explore the idea of isolation, in physical terms. On the other, I thought it would be interesting to create a story which really consists of two parallel halves. The first half forms a mystery; the second half, which is initially not revealed, an explanation.

As to the central conceit of the story, I doubt whether it's possible, but who knows. In 1900, superconductivity would have been considered impossible, or at least unlikely, but in 1911 it was actually discovered. Perhaps superisolation is also possible.

The implications of isolating an area of space completely from the rest of space are probably far more profound than is immediately obvious. If an area inside a box is completely isolated from the area outside of the box, can we still regard space as a continuous entity that penetrates the box?

The idea calls into question our intuitive idea of space, which itself must surely be an abstraction of the mind in large part.

The idea of a scientist as a possible murderer is also intriguing and something the story explores. How are the police supposed to investigate a crime when the criminal has used methods unknown even to other scientists, never mind the police themselves?

In practice, however, scientists tend to be rather unworldly (although perhaps less so than they used to be) and I don't doubt that most of them would make the same mistakes that every other criminal makes. The commission of a perfect murder would require a sort of genius of murder with a lifelong dedication to plotting murders; a sort of inverse Sherlock Holmes (a Moriarty, perhaps), rather than a scientist.

Here I thought it would be interesting nevertheless to create a situation where a scientist has the means to perfectly make bodies vanish, alongside a possible, if speculative, motive, and the sort of slightly irregular character that would tend to divide opinion.

In next week's story I intend to return again to the idea of the scientist as murderer, because as a matter of fact, chemists are rather more suited to the business of making bodies vanish than physicists, and little or no additional elements of fantasy are required to turn a chemist into an adept disposer of bodies.