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 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.

The first manned trip to Pluto discovers some fascinating and alarming information. A trip to Pluto uncovers information that changes science and human history as we know it.

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.

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.

Days after announcing an invention that will change the fabric of his futuristic world, an inventor goes missing and two detectives must find out where he is and what his supposedly groundbreaking invention was.

A mathematician tries to convince his machinist friend to travel through time with him, leading to a heated discussion of man’s hubris and the possible paradoxes that could open up if they disturb the time-space continuum.

In the near future, an energy crisis compels humanity to take advantage of the one source left untouched by industrialization: the past.

A series of journal entries based in the far future mark a middle-aged female scientist’s descent into Adamancy: a disordered obsession with diamantine structures on Neptune that, when melted, allow for instantaneous travel through space. The diaries, alongside reportage on the creation of “the Melee,” or teleportation technology from these diamonds, tell the story of the scientist’s entrapment by her colleague— and her attempted escape.

An elderly Chinese engineer reflects the time he spends working on obsolete space craft in relative isolation.