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"Building one space station for everyone was and is insane: we should have built a dozen."
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In this short story, Arnold Fessenden is an eccentric scientist who shows a friend his greatest discovery.
The two disks neutralize gravity between them. It turns out (conveniently!) that time proceeds much more quickly in the miniature universe; a year of their time was just a moment of ours.
Fessenden conducted a series of experiments in which he altered the conditions - and destinies - of tiny inhabited worlds to see what would happen, often destroying entire civilizations in the process.
(Fessenden's World by Edmond Hamilton) For a similar story, see the much more famous Microcosmic God, a 1941 story by Theodore Sturgeon. Another point of interest in the story is the name of the main character, Arnold Fessenden. Hamilton probably took it from Reginald Fessenden, a Canadian-born inventor who was the first to figure out how to transmit natural sound like speech and music by radio (as opposed to Morse code signals). On the evening of December 24, 1906 (Christmas Eve), Fessenden used the alternator-transmitter to send out a short program from Brant Rock, which included his playing the song O Holy Night on the violin and reading a passage from the Bible. See also the microcosm from Hamilton's 1935 story The Cosmic Pantograph. Comment/Join this discussion ( 0 ) | RSS/XML | Blog This | Additional
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