When a scientist discovers science-based information that negates his world's established creation myth and belief system, he sends the world into chaos, with some zealots clinging desperately to their dogma, while others attempt to embrace the unknown future.

While attempting to convince an older man that his son has not gone to the devil, a professor engages in discussion about the shape of the earth.

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.

When he comes back home from work to find that his wife has been cheating on him, a mad scientist builds a time machine to go back in time and ensure that her mother never gives birth to her, but things don’t turn out as expected.

When a physics professor reaches the cusp of his greatest work, he pressures his friend into sharing research information and lands himself into trouble with the U.S. military.

An academic prides herself in her powers of observation, but finds herself unable to change the fate of those suffering around her—whether it be a microscopic rotifer in biology lab, a long-dead boy whose letters she reads from the 1800s, or her twenty-one-year old cousin.

A thirteen-year-old space fanatic's day is made when he meets his astronaut role model, but he soon learns that his hero is not who he thought.

A group of nine explorers volunteer to survey extreme planets, but they are disharmonious because one of their members is a prickly empath. On their journey, they encounter a planet where the only living things seem to be the plants...until the empath is attacked, and they start to wonder if there is other life on the planet.

After discovering the remnants left by an extinct extraterrestrial species, a Jesuit astrophysicist asks the spirit of Father Loyola what there’s left for a Christian like him to believe.

While recovering from a serious illness, a ninety-year-old scientist wades through his patchy memory, piecing together fragments of images and emotions from his childhood as an immigrant in the once-moving American 1940s. He thinks about his admiration for airplanes, which have been outlawed in this alternate history. He considers how such scientific advancements can also bring about great destruction.