Haertel's Significance In Three Timelines III

In The Star Dwellers:

It is 2050:

"...nearly two decades after the discovery of the Haertel faster-than-light drive..."

-James Blish, The Star Dwellers (London, 1979), 3, p. 34.

That year, 2050, makes the events of this juvenile novel contemporaneous with those of A Case Of Conscience, Book Two, although the two novels are set in different timelines. Four other intelligent species are known of in The Star Dwellers whereas, in A Case Of Conscience, the Lithians are the first such species.

The Haertel field protects passengers from the effects of acceleration in over-the-atmosphere rocket flights and in interplanetary flight.

Milne had transformed Lorenz-Fitzgerald contraction and mass increase from natural laws into a teaching convenience, thus eliminating the light-speed limit. Haertel had used Mach's axiom to show that this limit disappeared if the mass of the whole universe was taken into account. Engineers inserted different probable values for M into Haertel's equations until one worked.

Every time that we read about Haertel's discovery, it is a different account. I do not think that there is any comparable information in A Case Of Conscience but, in any case, incapacitated with a cold, I am not about to look for it. Probably a retreat to passive reading for the rest of today.