Haertel's Significance In Three Timelines

 

If the central character of James Blish's Welcome To Mars had not been surnamed Haertel, then there would have been no reason to classify this novel as belonging to the Haertel Scholium. 

Publication Order

The Star Dwellers (1961)

Mission To The Heart Stars (1965)

Welcome To Mars (1966)

Midsummer Century (1972)

The Quincunx Of Time (1973)

The first and second titles form a pair as do the fourth and fifth. Thus, these five novels present three narratives.

In Mission To The Heart Stars:

Einstein ruled out faster-than-light travel;

"Milne...taught that the speed-of-light limitation was only a mathematical limitation, not a natural law."

-James Blish, Mission To The Heart Stars (London, 1980), CHAPTER FOUR, p. 47;

in the mid-1960's, Dingle found errors in Einstein's reasoning;

in 2011, a paper by Haertel showed that Einstein's relativity was a special case of Milne's which was a special case of Haertel's;

in 2030, faster-than-light interstellar travel began.

Jack Loftus is the hero of these first two novels. Jack's mentor, Dr Langer, thinks that Haertel was the greatest theoretical physicist ever.

It remains to summarize information about "Haertel" as given both in Welcome To Mars and in The Quincunx Of Time. However, it is getting late here and there is always tomorrow.