A scientist notes the discovery of a new chemical compound with physics-defying capabilities.

On a train ride to a metallurgical conference in Chicago, a consultant tries to avoid the debate between pure and applied sciences, but he cannot avoid it when he gets cornered in the washroom by two professors and an undecided bright new recruit.

A young man working in an intense laboratory falls madly in love with a machine that can invent new sensations on this skin - until the experiment is destroyed.

A collection of excerpts regarding humanity's various pursuits of science throughout time.

A catalog of the tools different alien species use to read and write, leading to fundamental questions about what it means to make patterns of knowledge against the noise of the universe.

A father-son duo of physicists set out to explore the mysteries of time travel, but when they manage to bring something back from the prehistoric past, they find that their discovery is far beyond what they expected.

Through three tales of impossible machines with abilities to manipulate the physical world, travel through time and space, and bestow telepathy onto an entire community, candidates of an engineering exam in the far future are asked to ponder fantastical implications of technology.

In the near future, two men—a quiet, rule-following biologist and a swashbuckling engineer—are tasked with a decades-long mission to colonize a planet outside the Solar System. But in the spaceship’s close quarters, tensions bubble up until one man decides he is going to kill the other.

A scientist travels to a space station orbiting Jupiter to try and figure out why the technology linking a human to a rudimentary, genetically-engineered form on the planet's surface. Over the course of his stay, he tries to figure out the nature of the relationship between the minds of the Jovian being and the human.

In seventeenth-century Delft, a fanatically curious fabric merchant invents the microscope. Even as he neglects and abuses his family, he discovers a new world of life.