The Billiard Ball is sufficiently beyond any known physics that it’s impossible to say anything meaningful about what would really happen.
My understanding was that it reverted to plain old billiard ball (moving at light speed) when it left the field.
In which case, per the What If referenced above (Relativistic Baseball), the entire demonstration room and an appreciable fraction of the city around it would disappear into a thermonuclear fireball within a microsecond.
Right, exactly. And that’s something that currently-known physics is completely incapable of describing.
I’m trying to remember the name of a short sci-fi novel/novella I read maybe 10 years ago, although it was published more like circa 1950.
An average Midwestern town, unbeknownst to the majority of the town’s residents, is the site of a top secret military research facility. The Soviets find out and drop a nuclear bomb on the town, but instead of destroying everything, the energy from the blast cause the entire town to time travel to the distant future. The townspeople find themselves on a future Earth where the sun is dying and the planet is much colder and mostly dead. They find an abandoned domed city apparently heated by geothermal energy, apparently humanity’s last ditch effort to survive on the dying Earth. A space ship notices their presence, brings them on board, and the captain explains to our 20th century heroes that humanity has mastered space flight and abandoned Earth long ago to settle other planets.
One detail I remember is the the captain of the spaceship is a woman, which I’m sure was really progressive for the time, yet in other ways if was incredibly sexist, with characters saying things like “the female mind isn’t able to grasp such concepts”. Anyway, I don’t remember the rest of the story quite as well, but IIRC the government of this future society debates just what they should do with these people from the 20th century who have suddenly arrived, while the main characters try to assimilate. In the end, they (the people from the 20th century) realize this future world is too strange and foreign to them, and they ask to return to their town on Earth, where they intend to make a go of surviving there (maybe with the help of some future technology, but also with a big dose of good old American ingenuity).
Interesting. I’ll look around.
City at World’s End by Edmond Hamilton.
[ninja’d]
Yes, that’s it!
I remembered that the title was something like “The City at [somewhere]”, but all I could think of was “City on the Edge of Forever”, and I know that was a Star Trek episode so that couldn’t be it.
From one of James White’s Sector General books–a doctor is on a planet where the natives live at a bare subsistence level. Somebody is badly injured and the doctor is caring for him in his ship (or possibly a cave or something he has relocated into). The aliens are getting restless about when the person will be cured so that they can be returned to their family, the doctor keeps telling them it will be a while. When the person is returned healed, everyone is shocked. For the doctor, “cured” meant “restored to health”. For the aliens, “cured” meant the meat of the obviously mortally wounded person prepared for eating by the desperate population. (The word “cured” might not have been used.)
Which story?
I don’t know, but I’m going to look up that story, sounds good.
I read one of the Sector General stories in a collection somewhere, and found myself amazed at the author: Here’s someone who can conceive of a cloud of alien bacteria being a sentient person, but couldn’t conceive of the same thing of a human woman.
Haven’t found it yet, but at least here’s a list of the Sector General stories with some sort of synopsis of each James White Information
James Nicoll wrote of White: (he) seems from all reports to have been a very pleasant fellow but he did have one huge blind spot, which is that he was as sexist as a giant ball of sexists wrapped in a dense layer of yet more sexists.
There was an apocalyptic novel I read many years ago. It’s framed by Nostradamus previewing for an assistant his prediction of the end of the world.
Amid rising global tensions, a man is scrambling to find an affordable nuclear holocaust survival suit for his daughter. A stranger offers to give him one but only if he signs an affidavit stating that by preparing for Armageddon, he bears responsibility for its occurrence.
Bombs fall, he’s rescued by a submarine with Alice in Wonderland characters, flung into a future nuclear winter, and along with some contemporaries, put on trial for ending the world (the prosecution is on behalf of everyone whose existence was made impossible by the end of humanity).
The book’s epigraph is a poem by Robert Frost.
James Morrow I think
Here you go: This Is the Way the World Ends (novel) - Wikipedia
And it does have a quote from Robert Frost, judging from the excerpt from the copyright page that I can see.
What’s the in-novel logic for why he’s responsible?
Because he signed the affidavit, of course.
And I’m guessing that the Frost poem was “Fire and Ice”? That’s usually the one that’s paired with Eliott’s “Wasteland” (the source of the “This is the way the World ends” quote).
Well, by that logic, and based on some paperwork I just scribbled, I am now emperor of the world. So, a little respect, if you please.