In the following essay, Martina relates "The Killers" to breakthroughs in physics happening at the time of the story's creation.

"The Killers" can be seen as a concise and dramatic representation of certain aspects of Albert Einstein's theory of relativity and Werner Heisenberg's principle of indeterminacy (or uncertainty). In general and simplified terms, relativity argues that time and mass are relative, not absolute, measurements, and that therefore seemingly fixed things, such as the motion of clocks and the shape of tables, are in fact dependent on their actual motion (as through space) and the perspective of the viewer. Lincoln Barnett explains that "there is no such thing as a fixed interval of time independent of the system to which it is referred" and that "the mass of a moving body is by no means constant."

The principle of indeterminacy, introduced by Heisenberg in the same year that...