THIOTIMOLINE AND THE SPACE AGE
by Isaac Asimov
This remarkable report does not actually concern a major breakthrough of the past year. The original publication of the discovery of Thiotimoline is, after all, fourteen years old now. But I feel that s-f readers have almost a vested interest In the progress of time research—as indeed also in the Good Doctor himself—and that the selection was especially appropriate here between Miss Emmett’s strangely convincing traffic with the past, and Marshall King’s story of young Purnie’s time-play.
(Transcript of a speech delivered at the 12th annual meeting of the American Chronochemical Society.)
Gentlemen:
I have been called the founder of chronochemistry and in response I cannot resist a certain sense of pride. To have originated a new science is a privilege given to very few.
I can still remember, quite clearly, that day in 1947 when I first dropped a pinch of thiotimoline into water and thought I noticed something odd. To be sure, it dissolved rapidly; but I was used to that. It always seemed to vanish the instant it touched the water.
But I had never handled a sample of thiotimoline quite as pure as the pinch I had obtained that July day and, as I watched the white powder drop toward the water, I distinctly remember myself thinking, “Why, that dissolved before it hit the water.”
Well, it’s an old story to you, I know, though I still like to linger on the thrill of the slow awakening of certainty; of the measurements taken; of the first crude timings by eye; of the more delicate work of the original endochronometer—the same instrument now at the Smithsonian.
The announcement of endochronicity, of the fact that a substance existed which dissolved in water 1.12 seconds before the water was added created a stir. You all remember it, I’m sure. And yet, somehow, the impression arose that thiotimoline was a hoax. There was a distinct air of amusement in many of the comments in the learned journals. Private communications reaching me showed a distressing tendency to describe experiments which obviously lacked all scientific validity and which, I could but conclude, were meant as some sort of joke. Perhaps the final proof of the damage this has done is that after twelve years of existence, the American Chronochemical Society can muster an audience of exactly fifteen people to hear this talk.
It has been an expensive joke, gentlemen, one that has cost us our lead in the race for space. For while American researchers have, but with difficulty, obtained grants to continue their investigations of thiotimoline and have been starved into small-scale experiments, while withering under the genial air of disbelief on the part of their colleagues, the Soviet Union has established the town Khruschevsk in the Urals, whose popular nickname of “Tiotimolingrad” will well describe the nature of the activities that go on behind the walls of the modern and well-equipped scientific laboratories that have been established there.
That the Soviet Union has taken thiotimoline seriously and has done something about it is as sure as can be, and yet we remain sunk in complacency. No important political figure has viewed the matter with alarm. If they have said anything at all for publication, it is simply, “What’s thiotimoline?” I intend now to explain to these near-sighted politicos just what thiotimoline means to our space effort.
Thiotimoline research graduated from what we might now call the “classical” stage, to the “modern” with the development of the “telechronic battery” by Anne McLaren and Donald Michie of the University of Edinburgh. If you have read about it anywhere, you can only be clairvoyant, for the popular press and much of the learned press maintained a stubborn silence. In fact, the original paper appeared only in the small though highly respected, Journal of Irreproducible Results, edited by that able gentleman Alexander Kohn. Let me describe the telechronic battery.
A simple endochronometer—with which we are all acquainted—is a device which will automatically deliver water into a small tube containing thiotimoline. The thiotimoline will dissolve 1.12 seconds before the water is delivered.
Imagine the endochronometer so connected with a second similar unit that the solution of the thiotimoline in the first activates the water-delivering pipette of the second. The thiotimoline of the second unit will dissolve 1.12 seconds before that water is delivered, and therefore 2.24 seconds before the water is delivered to the first unit.
An indefinite number of endochronometers can thus be hooked up, the thiotimoline of each of the series dissolving 1.12 seconds before the preceding member. A battery consisting of about 77,000 such units would yield a final sample of thiotimoline which dissolved a full day before the initial quantity of water was delivered.
Such batteries have now been developed both at Edinburgh and in my own laboratories in Boston in extremely compact models, through use of printed circuits and advanced miniaturization. A device of not more than a cubic foot in volume can afford a twenty-four hour endochronic interval. There is strong, if indirect, evidence that the Soviet Union possesses even more sophisticated devices and is turning them out in commercial quantities.
The obvious practical application of the telechronic battery is that of weather prediction. In other words, if the first element of a battery is exposed to the air in such a way that rain, if any, will fall upon it, the final element will dissolve the day before and thus offer a foolproof method of predicting rain—or lack of rain—one day ahead.
I trust you will all see, gentlemen, that the telechronic battery can be used for generalized predictions as well.
Suppose, to take a frivolous example, you were interested in a particular horse race. Suppose you intended to place a wager that a particular horse would win that race. Twenty-four hours in advance of the race, you could make up your mind quite firmly that if the horse were to win the next day, you would, immediately upon receiving the news, add water to the first element of a telechronic battery. If it did not win, you would not.
Having made that decision, you need then but observe the last element. If the thiotimoline in that last element dissolves—followed by a chain of solutions all along the battery at 1.12 second intervals, with which you need not be concerned—you will know that the horse will win beyond doubt. You might even, if you were in a flamboyant mood, allow the solution of the final element to activate a flashing light, a fire gong, a charge of explosive; anything that will unmistakably attract your attention.
You laugh, gentlemen, and yet can this system not be applied, without change, to the launching of a satellite?
Suppose that four hours after launching, an automatic device on board the satellite telemeters a signal to the launching base. Suppose, next, that this radio signal is designed to activate the first element of a telechronic battery.
Do you see the consequences? The sending of the signal four hours after launching can only mean that the satellite is safely in orbit. If it were not, it would have plunged to destruction before the four hours had elapsed. If then, the final element of the telechronic battery dissolves today, we can be certain that there will be a successful launching tomorrow and all may proceed.
If the final element does not dissolve, the launching will not be successful and there must, therefore, be something wrong with the satellite assembly. A team of technicians will begin checking the device and at the moment when the defective item is corrected, the telechronic battery will operate. The launching will then be scheduled in the full expectation of success.