Haertel's Significance In Three Timelines II

See: Haertel's Significance In Three Timelines

Publication Order

The Star Dwellers (1961)

Mission To The Heart Stars (1965)

Welcome To Mars (1966)

Midsummer Century (1972)

The Quincunx Of Time (1973)

Only the first, second and fifth of these Haertel Scholium novels present a scenario of interstellar civilization with regular use of the Haertel overdrive. Mission To The Heart Stars, a direct sequel to The Star Dwellers, culminates when "Angels" (energy beings) and Earthmen begin to lead an alliance of other intelligent species, including dolphins, beadmungen and the feline Aaa, against the Heart Stars federation, the Hegemony of Malis, whereas, in The Quincunx Of Time, Earth alone, monopolizing the instantaneous Dirac transmitter with its messages from the future, leads a utopian intergalactic civilization. If the Haertel Scholium had comprised a single linear sequence, then the Martian dune-cats in Welcome To Mars might have taken the place of the Aaa in the two Jack Loftus novels.

In Welcome To Mars:

Einstein maintained that gravity was not a force but a condition of space and tried to prove that it lacked polarity;

Milne's relativity incorporated Einstein's;

in the late twentieth century, Adolph ("Dolph") Haertel, aged seventeen, studied Milne, Dingle and any other theoreticians of gravity;

Haertel discovered that gravity has polarity and can be easily manipulated by working with it instead of against it.

In James Blish's Cities In Flight, control of gravity (with polarity) leads to a faster-than-light interstellar drive. Is this what happens in the Haertel Scholium, at least in that branch of the Scholium represented by Welcome To Mars? Alternatively, one Haertel discovers anti-gravity and another discovers FTL. Texts bear alternative interpretations.

In The Quincunx Of Time:

Haertel, aged seventeen, assumed that the geometry of ultimate particles is Pythagorean, not Euclidean, applying to points, not to lines, and thus transformed particle physics;

Haertel's assumption generated a Unified Field Theory and abolished both the equivalency principle and most of quantum mechanics except the part that is necessary for the Dirac transmitter;

Thor Wald, inventor of the transmitter, jocularly suggests that Haertel "'...must have been God...'" (James Blish, The Quincunx Of Time (New York, 1973), CHAPTER SIX, p. 67)

The Quincunx Of Time follows Welcome To Mars by stating that Haertel did something important at the age of seventeen. However, he either discovered anti-gravity or assumed Pythagorean particle geometry. These seem to be completely different.