"Simon Hawke - Timewars 3 - The Pimpernel Plot" - читать интересную книгу автора (Hawke Simon)

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Epilogue
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An End to War…
On April 1, 2425, Dr. Wolfgang Amadeus Mensinger, professor
emeritus at Heinlein University on Dyson One, discovered
time travel. Already hailed as the greatest scientist of his time
for his formulation of the Unified Field Theory at the age of
eighty-five, Mensinger had been in disfavor with the scientific
community for thirty years as a result of steadfastly maintaining
that time travel or, as he preferred to call it, temporal translocation,
was theoretically possible. When he made the announcement
on his one hundred and fifteenth birthday, he
promptly became the darling of the media. Had anyone else
come forth with such a theory, he would have been just another
mild and amusing curiosity, but when the man who had
relegated Einstein to the league of the also-rans made such a
pronouncement, people listened.
Access to the media had never been a problem for Dr.
Mensinger. He was a garrulous, highly articulate, and charming
man with an empathy for the nonscientific mind, which
resulted in his being able to explain complex ideas in a manner
that the layman could easily understand. He also understood
what, traditionally, most scientists did not, that scientific
research was to a large degree a game of politics.
Initially, his theory was received with great excitement by
the media and the masses, while his colleagues in the scientific
community reacted with a degree of skepticism that bordered
on derision. Most of them felt that the venerable Dr.
Mensinger had already done his best work and that in reaching
for a still greater achievement, he had overextended himself
and irresponsibly turned to cheap sensationalism. The
media, always anxious for an entertaining confrontation, provided
countless opportunities for his critics to attack him, which

Time Wars #3
attacks were made more feasible by the simple expedient of
Dr. Mensinger’s lacking any proof to back up his assertions.
Furious at the treatment accorded him by the media and his
peers, Mensinger went into semiseclusion at the university on
Dyson, where the administration was more than happy to provide
some limited funding for his research in exchange for
having the famous Dr. Mensinger as a lecturer on its faculty.
Professor Mensinger married the daughter of the dean and
settled into the academic life, all the while driving himself with