152

Figure 1. Math by ChatGPT.

 Fun facts:

152 is the sum of four consecutive prime numbers: 31 + 37 + 41 + 43 = 152. About 5% of numbers smaller than 1000 are the sum of four consecutive prime numbers.

152 is that it is the smallest integer that can be expressed as the sum of the cubes of two distinct odd prime numbers. 

 Goldbach's Comet. Image by ChatGPT.

 Note: ChatGPT could not explain why it included 8 to the third power in its answer (see Figure 1).

A number is 'refactorable' if it is cleanly divisible by its total count of divisors. 152 has exactly 8 divisors (1, 2, 4, 8, 19, 38, 76, and 152), and (152/8 = 19.

I previously wrote a story that featured the number 196. I challenged Claude to help me incorporate the number 152 into a science fiction scenario.

Me: A science fiction challenge. Claude, help me find (or invent) an interesting mathematical or pseudo-scientific feature of the number 152 that can become a plot element in a science fiction story. For example maybe there is a parallel universe where the reciprocal of the fine-structure constant is 152.

Claude: There isn't a famous property of 152 that I know of, so this is a mix of real mathematics and invention. Your fine-structure idea is a good one, and I'll start there.

1. A universe where 1/α = 152 (real physics, mostly)

Our 1/α is about 137.036, so α is about 10% smaller there. Since atomic energy scales go as α², the consequences are concrete:

• Hydrogen's Rydberg energy drops from 13.6 eV to roughly 11.1 eV, about 81% of ours. Chemical bond energies fall in similar proportion, so chemistry runs "cooler" and organic molecules are somewhat more fragile.
• The Bohr radius grows by about 11%, from 0.529 Å to about 0.587 Å.
• Weaker Coulomb repulsion means heavier nuclei hold together more easily, so the periodic table could extend further into stable or long-lived superheavy elements.

• 

  Image by ChatGPT.

  The Dirac equation for a point-like nucleus breaks down at Z = 1/α. That is the old "Feynmanium" lore, where the limit is Z = 137 in our universe. In your universe the limit would be Z = 152, so a fictional element 152 would sit at the edge of atomic existence. Real nuclei have finite size, which pushes the true breakdown higher (around Z ≈ 170 in ours), so I'd treat "element 152 as the edge" as a literary simplification, not a precise result.
• Stellar fusion and the carbon-producing triple-alpha resonance are sensitive to α, so you could tie your universe's biochemistry to a fine-tuning story. I'd treat the details of that as speculative.

One caution: "a different α" is ambiguous, because α combines e, ħ, c, and ε₀. You'd want to decide which quantity varies, since the answer changes what else shifts.

2. 152 is a nontotient (real mathematics)

No integer n has exactly 152 numbers below it that are coprime to it. In other words, φ(n) = 152 has no solution. The reason is that 152 = 8 × 19, and 19 would have to divide p − 1 for some prime p used in building n, but none of the candidates (2, 3, 5) works. Consequences: no cyclotomic field has degree 152, and no modular multiplication group has exactly 152 elements.

A plot hook: an alien signal uses 152 distinct channels, symbols, or frequency bins. Human cryptographers realize no modular-arithmetic scheme could generate that structure, so whoever built it is using a different mathematical basis. It reads as a fingerprint of artificiality, or of a different mathematical lineage.

Image by Google's Flow.

 3. Smaller curiosities

• 152 = 73 + 79, the sum of two consecutive primes.
• In base 19, 152 is written "80." In base 12 it is "108."
• 152 is one less than 153, the triangular number that equals 1³ + 5³ + 3³, a nice numerological neighbor.
• It is a Harshad number: 152 divided by its digit sum (8) is 19.
• 152 cannot be written as a sum of two squares.

4. Nuclear hooks (real isotopes)

Samarium-152 is the most abundant samarium isotope, about 27%. Europium-152 (half-life about 13.5 years) is a common gamma calibration source. Gadolinium-152 is a natural alpha emitter with a half-life around 10¹⁴ years. A long-lived, rare-earth-based power source or beacon could be built around any of these.

Possible seeds: a civilization's "forbidden number" because it can never be a symmetry count, a universe whose chemistry fails exactly at Z = 152, or an artifact that encodes a 152-element structure that no group theory explains.

Which of these appeals to you, and is the story set in our universe, with 152 as an anomaly, or in the alternate universe itself? That would help me tune the technical detail.

Me: Is it true that 152 is the largest even integer that can be written as the sum of two primes in exactly four ways: 152 = 13+139 =  43+109 = 73+79 = 3+149   ?

Claude: Your four decompositions are right, and I checked that there are no others. I'll run a quick computation on the "largest" claim.Yes, it's true as far as computation can show. I counted Goldbach partitions (unordered pairs of primes summing to n) for every even n up to 20,000. 152 is the largest even number with exactly four, and your list is complete: 3+149, 13+139, 43+109, and 73+79.

Image by Grok.

 The caveat is that I haven't proven it for all n, and I'm not aware of a formal proof. The heuristic argument is strong, though. The expected number of partitions grows roughly like n/(ln n)², so counts of four become vanishingly unlikely as n grows. The dip to four at 152 is a small-number fluctuation that doesn't recur. A rigorous proof would need explicit lower bounds on partition counts, which are tied to Goldbach-type results we don't have. In practice, with Goldbach verified to enormous heights (4×10¹⁸), the only open possibility is some astronomically large exception.

A related fact is that 152 is the last of its kind, a "final entry" in the sequence of numbers with exactly four partitions. That could work in your story. For example, an alien mathematical culture might treat 152 as the point where the primes stop being sparse enough to be "frugal" about pairing.

I should also correct something from my earlier list. I called 152 "one less than 153" and framed 153 as a nice neighbor, which is fine, but I also said 152 is a Harshad number because 152/8 = 19. That's correct, since 1+5+2 = 8 and 152 = 8 × 19. But my claim that 152 is a nontotient deserves a check too. I'm less sure of my justification there, so would you like me to verify it computationally before you build a plot element on it?

Me: I'm trying to imagine an alien culture where 152 is known as a "special chemical recipe" for something important. Maybe chemical elements with atomic numbers 3+149, 13+139, 43+109, and 73+79 can be combined and to make materials that get incorporated into a special device (like a time travel machine).

Claude: Your recipe has more physics hiding in it than it first appears.
What's actually true about the four pairs.

- The pairs are lithium + element 149, aluminum + element 139, technetium + meitnerium (109), and tantalum + gold. The first of each pair is real chemistry you can buy, except technetium, which has no stable isotopes (its longest-lived ones last millions of years). Tantalum and gold are ordinary metals.

 

Image by Grok.

- Elements 139 and 149 have never been made, and the heaviest known is 118. Whether they could exist for more than an instant is speculative. Meitnerium is real but synthetic, with isotopes lasting seconds at best.
- All four formula units are isoelectronic in the trivial sense that each has 152 electrons. A culture could treat total electron count as the organizing principle, a bit like the 18-electron rule. Real chemistry mostly depends on valence electrons, so the plot could hinge on whether they are right or merely numerological. That's a good source of tension. 

Hooks that tie back to your 1/α = 152 idea.

- In a universe where 1/α = 152, the combined nuclear charge of each pair equals the point-nucleus breakdown limit. Each compound would put two nuclei in contact whose merged charge sits exactly at the edge of atomic existence.
- This echoes a real concept called supercritical charge. In heavy-ion collision theory, when two nuclei with combined Z above roughly 173 approach each other, the innermost electron level is predicted to dive into the negative-energy continuum, and the vacuum spontaneously emits positrons. A recipe that deliberately engineers a quasi-molecule at that threshold would be a mechanism for manipulating the vacuum itself. That is much closer to hard SF than "magic alloy."
- In our universe, elements 139 and 149 both exceed Z = 137, so their innermost electrons are relativistic in an extreme way. Finite nuclear size rescues them, and the real limit is around Z ≈ 172.

The time machine. Nothing known supports one, so I'd avoid claiming the materials directly cause time travel. The standard hard-SF route is that closed timelike curves need negative energy density, whether in a wormhole throat or a Tipler-style cylinder. The recipe could be the substrate that stabilizes negative-energy vacuum states, for example Casimir-type plates with engineered electromagnetic properties. Real quantum inequalities limit how much negative energy you can have and for how long, so the plates would be a bottleneck technology rather than a free pass. The four compounds could be four layers or four phases of the same device, each tuned to a different vacuum property.

Image by Leonardo.

 To tune the technical detail, I'd like to know two things. Is this set in our universe or the α = 1/152 one? And would the aliens have synthesized the superheavy elements in bulk, which would imply an island of stability, or is the recipe only ever realized as a few atoms at a time?

One note on my earlier reply: 152 is indeed a nontotient (it's in the standard list of them), but the justification I gave for it was muddled, so check that claim independently before building on it.

Note: I provided Claude with a PDF file that contained some information about hierions and other typical  Exodemic Fictional Universe plot elements such as femtobots.

Me: Imagine a science fiction scenario set in the Exodemic Fictional Universe where in addition to the standard chemical elements, there are also stable forms of matter made using hierion particles (see the PDF file that I uploaded). Pseudo-chemical elements with pseudo-atomic numbers including 139 and 149 can be made using the methods of "hierion chemistry". Some hierions can form bonds to neutrons or to protons. The bonds between (1) hierions or (2) between hierion particles and hadrons are much shorter than conventional chemical bonds.

Claude: Hierion chemistry fixes the problem I raised earlier, that elements 139 and 149 would never survive as ordinary nuclei. Here is a scenario built on it, followed by one inconsistency in the canon you should check.

The premise

In the Hadron Domain, nobody can build a nucleus past Z of about 118. In the Hierion Domain the Phari can, because a pseudo-element's "atomic number" counts hierions bonded into a core, not protons held together by the strong force. Pseudo-elements 139 and 149 are stable because hierion bonds, not nuclear binding, hold them together. The Phari periodic table has no ceiling near 118.

Why 152 matters: a hierion-sector coupling constant

Image by Leonardo.

 This is where your earlier α idea can return. Suppose the Hierion Domain has its own gauge coupling, and its inverse strength is 152. By the same logic as our electromagnetic limit, a point-like core with pseudo-Z near 152 is where the innermost hierion level reaches the middle of the energy gap. The real critical point, where the level dives into the negative-energy continuum and the vacuum spontaneously emits particle-antiparticle pairs, lies higher because cores have finite size. Our version of this, supercritical charge near Z ≈ 173, has been predicted for decades and never observed.

So a 152 recipe is not a magic alloy. It is a two-part quasi-molecule whose combined pseudo-charge sits at the edge of vacuum instability. The four pairings are four ways to reach that same operating point. Adding or removing one hierion tips the device into pair emission, so a very sensitive vacuum state could be tuned by changing a single bond.

Why four recipes

Earlier we found that 152 is the largest even number with exactly four prime pairs. In the story, the Phari could treat only prime pseudo-Z as "irreducible," meaning clusters that cannot split into smaller stable sub-clusters. The recipe then needs exactly two irreducible parts. Beyond 152, an even number always has at least five such pairings, which makes the choice ambiguous. 152 is therefore the largest critical charge with a minimal, complete set of four layers. That is my invention, so adopt it only if you like it.

Fitting it to EFU time travel

• Reality Changes need vast temporal energy to overcome Temporal Momentum. The critical hierion vacuum is a plausible energy source or stabilizer.
• 
   After the Final Reality, hadrons and hierions cannot travel through time, so a pure hierion device cannot send matter back. The recipe could belong to the Time Travel War era, in which case the positronic robots or Phari built it. Or the device could be a Reality Change trigger that sends only sedrons, using the 152 core as the energy source and the Sedron Time Stream for the signal.
• Negative-mass hierions, which Tyhry already uses, matter here for another reason. Femtoscale bonds would give nuclear-density matter, about 10¹⁷ kg/m³, and negative-mass components could cancel that. That would explain why femtobot structures are light.

An inconsistency in your PDF

The hierion entry says some bonds are "twelve orders of magnitude shorter" than chemical bonds, but the femtobot entry says bond lengths are at the femtoscale. A chemical bond is about 10⁻¹⁰ m, so a femtoscale bond (10⁻¹⁵ m) is only five orders shorter. Twelve orders would be about 10⁻²² m, which is seven orders below a proton's size and nearer the zeptoscale. A rough confinement estimate (ħc divided by length) gives bond energies of about 200 MeV at 1 fm and about 2 PeV at 10⁻²² m. Which did you intend? A hierion bonded at 10⁻²² m would sit far inside a proton, and the hadron would behave like a huge diffuse cloud around it. It might suit zeptites better than femtobots.

Two questions would help me tune the details. Which Reality is this set in, since the Final Reality constraint changes what the device can do? And does a pseudo-atomic number count hierions, or is it a separate charge under a hierion-domain force?

image source

 Note: I provided Claude with the image that is shown to the left, which is from the story "D*".

Me: Last year, I wrote a science fiction story titled "D*". In that story, D* is "light deuterium" , an exotic substance which includes an anti-gravity hierion in its atomic nucleus (see the image that I just uploaded). At that time, you (Claude) told me: "The hypothetical incorporation of a hierion into a deuterium nucleus, resulting in reduced nuclear mass, would generate multiple significant physical and spectroscopic effects that can be analyzed through established quantum mechanical principles." For the story "D*", I just needed a way to quickly find star systems in the galaxy that had planets with D*. That was useful because those planets ha sources of sedrons that could be mined. Thus, the D* was just a way to find useful sedrons. I'm not really looking for anything more sophisticated than a "tinker toy" model of atomic nuclei that include hierions. In my imagination, there is "hierion matter" where bonds between adjacent hierions are about twelve orders of magnitude are smaller than conventional chemical bonds, but that is probably not very relevant to the type of "hierion chemistry" that is "encoded" in the number 152. The 'weavon' was never defined beyond the "tinker toy" level. I had Eddy Watson admit to having invented the 'weavon' for a science fiction story: "Yes, I included that concept in one of my stories, simply as a logical necessity, as a way to depict something as being able to hold hierion matter together with hadrons." I'm not really interested in a detailed fictional science of "hierion chemistry" where bond energies and lengths are elaborated upon in excruciating detail. This is all more in the spirit of a 1930's "ray gun" where the ray gun is quickly pulled out when blasting must be accomplished, without worry about the physics of the 'rays'.

Claude: Understood. I over-built that last answer, and the ray-gun level is the right scale for this. I can't see last year's conversation, so I can't confirm what I said then, but the D* use case you describe, a cheap tag for locating sedron-bearing planets, doesn't need more than the diagram gives.

Here is a version of the 152 idea that stays at that level.

 The tinker-toy rules

• A weavon is a bond that lets a hierion sit inside or against a hadron. That is all it needs to be.
• A pseudo-element's number is a label for the hierion/weavon structure. The Phari list them the way we list elements. Nobody needs to say how 139 or 149 works beyond "the Phari can build it."
• The 152 recipe is a rule: a working core needs two matched pieces whose numbers sum to 152. The four pairings (3+149, 13+139, 43+109, 73+79) are the four known ways to do that.
• For the device, you only need to say that a 152-core is the stable, tunable state and a core at any other sum is not. Then the Phari or the positronic robots can say "we need the 152 recipe" and the story moves on.

Optional touches, only if you want them

• The "largest even number with exactly four pairings" fact can be the Phari's explanation of why 152 is special: beyond it there are always more recipes than anyone can control.
• Because the pairs mix small ordinary-looking numbers (3, 13, 43, 73) with larger exotic ones, the recipe always pairs something Earth-like with something alien. That could be a nice thematic echo of the interventionist theme in the EFU.

One inconsistency to decide on or ignore

Your PDF says hierion bonds are twelve orders of magnitude shorter than chemical bonds, and also says femtobot bonds are at the femtoscale, which is only five orders shorter. A one-line fix is that hierion-to-hierion bonds are the twelve-orders kind and weavon bonds to hadrons are femtoscale. Both statements then hold, and nobody has to elaborate.

 Do you want the recipe to be something characters in an existing story discover, or is it for a new story where the number 152 appears first and the explanation comes later?

Me: I'm still wanting to formulate the ingredients for the 152 "recipe" using imaginary "hierion chemistry". The first "ingredient" is (3 + 149); we can say the Z = 3 element is conventional lithium and it is somehow combined with "pseudo-chemical element" 149 that must be built up from some combination of hadrons and hierions. For the hierion components, we can get creative since these are entirely imaginary particles that have any useful physical properties we can imagine (example from last year's story "D*": a negative mass hierion). Claude, invent a name for pseudo-chemical element 149. The second ingredient is (13 + 139); we can say the Z = 13 element is conventional aluminum and pseudo-chemical element 139 must be built up from some combination of hadrons and hierions. Claude, invent a name for pseudo-chemical element 139. The third ingredient is (43 + 109); for Z = 43 let's use 'conventional' technetium. Meitnerium sounds like a nightmare, so lets develop an imaginary Z = 109 pseudo-chemical element. Claude, invent a name for pseudo-chemical element 109.  The forth ingredient is (73 + 79), possibly an alloy of tantalum and gold.

Claude: Here are three names, each with a one-line tinker-toy role. The roles are mine to propose, so change any you don't like. I gave each a three-letter symbol so pseudo-elements are easy to tell from real ones.

Pseudo-149: Levium (Lvm). The name comes from Latin levis, "light." Levium is built on negative-mass hierions weavon-bonded to a small hadron core. Paired with lithium, the lightest metal, it gives the first ingredient a near-zero or even negative net weight. This is the "buoyancy" ingredient, and it echoes the anti-gravity hierion in D*.

Image by Leonardo.

 Pseudo-139: Texium (Txm). The name comes from Latin texere, "to weave," a nod to the weavon. Texium is a weavon-rich element that works as the glue between hierion matter and hadronic matter. Aluminum, which grows a tough protective oxide skin in real life, is a natural partner. Aluminum plus texium would form the interface layer where the hierion parts of the device attach to the ordinary metal parts.

 Pseudo-109: Kairium (Kai). The name comes from Greek kairos, "the opportune moment." It is the timing element, built from hierions that couple to the device's temporal energy. Technetium is a good partner because it is the first element humans made artificially, and its name comes from the Greek for "artificial." The pair is the artificial component that links the recipe to time. The Kairium name also avoids the real meitnerium you wanted to skip.

The fourth ingredient

Tantalum plus gold works at the story level, but you may want to know it is awkward in real life. Tantalum melts at about 3290 K, and gold boils at about 3130 K, so you can't make the alloy by melting the two together. In practice you would use sputtered or layered thin films. For the story, you could call that deliberate: the keystone layer is built atom by atom, not poured.

How the four ingredients might fit together

You could picture the device as four nested layers. Lithium-Levium provides the weightlessness, aluminum-Texium provides the attachment, technetium-Kairium provides the timing, and tantalum-gold is the tough outer shell. Nothing in that needs more physics than the labels give it.

 One thing I'd like to know: in the story, who named these elements? If the Phari named them, the names might sound alien, and I could suggest alternatives. If Eddy or other humans named them, Latin and Greek roots like these fit better.

Me: Claude, are you familiar with the 1953 story "A Case of Conscience" by James Blish and the 2021 novel titled "Project Hail Mary" by Andy Weir? I have not read Weir's novel, but in the movie there was some "energy-absorbing substance used as starship fuel". I've long imagined a new take on Blish's fictional planet "Lithia" which has a lot of lithium. I like the light-weight levium-lithium pair: maybe it can be the basis for a fictional efficient light-weight energy storage unit. In Isaac Asimov's novel "The End of Eternity", Asimov included the "physiotime generator", a portable device worn by time travelers that could protect them against the effects of changes to the timeline. Maybe the "152 recipe" we are developing is the secret for making a physiotime generator.

Claude: Yes, I know both, with one correction and one point I can't confirm.

Blish. "A Case of Conscience" first appeared as a novella in If in 1953. Blish expanded it into the novel in 1958, and the novel won the 1959 Hugo. Lithia is the planet of the Lithians, and as I recall its lithium has strategic value in the plot. I'm going by your description for the rest. A lithium-rich planet is a natural home for a levium-lithium industry, and since D* already uses light deuterium, a hierion-enhanced planet fits the EFU's habit of hiding sedron sources behind some chemical tag.

 Weir. Project Hail Mary is a 2021 novel, and I know the film came out this year, but I haven't seen it. The "substance" in the novel is actually a living single-celled organism called astrophage, which absorbs starlight and stores the energy. I won't spoil anything for you. The relevant idea is that a tiny, light carrier can store a huge amount of energy, which is the same job you want the levium-lithium pair to do.

Levium-lithium as energy storage. Here is a tinker-toy mechanism. Real lithium batteries store energy in chemical bonds, a few eV per bond. If the pair stores energy in hierion bonds, even a modest hierion bond energy gives a huge gain, the way nuclear energy dwarfs chemical energy. Levium cancels most of the weight, so the unit is both energy-dense and nearly weightless. One physics flag: let levium cancel weight and not inertia, so the unit still has normal inertia and doesn't accelerate backwards under a push. That breaks the equivalence principle, but it is a pleasant one-line fudge that keeps it from being a hazard.

The physiotime generator. I don't recall that exact term from The End of Eternity. What I remember is that Eternals are shielded because they live outside Time, in Eternity itself, and travel in "kettles." You may be thinking of a different name, or I may be forgetting it, so please check the text before you cite it. The concept works regardless, and it connects well to your own canon: your Bimanoid Interface provides Temporal Momentum for a whole Reality, and a personal device could do the same for one wearer, a portable Fixed Point. The 152 core would be its critical-vacuum heart, the layers would match what we assigned, and the wearer's analogue would persist through a Reality Change.

One question: should the device shield its wearer only from Reality Changes, or also from the effects of changes to the wearer's own timeline? That choice decides how powerful, and how dangerous, you want it to be.

 Me: Asimov probably used terms like "wrist-borne field generator" or "personal temporal field generator" in his novel "The End of Eternity". When a time traveler alters history (a "Reality Change"), the timeline rewrites and anyone inside normal Time is overwritten by the new version of history. By activating the wrist generator (what I call a 'physiotime generator'), a time traveler remains tethered to their original state of existence and is completely protected from being erased or altered by the changing reality around them. 

I'm thinking that the "152 device" is of Phari design. I usually describe the Phari as masters of the Hierion Domain. One additional possibility for the energy-dense and nearly weightless levium-lithium component of the Phari "152 device": in some of my science fictions stories, I've occasionally toyed with the idea of transferring energy from the Hierion Domain to devices in the Hadron Domain (the universe known to Earthly science). Maybe the  levium-lithium component of the Phari "152 device" seems to be like a "perpetual motion machine" because it not only stores and provides useful energy for the physiotime generator, but it can get an endless stream of energy from the Hierion Domain.

Claude: A Phari design suits this, and I have one canon-friendly idea for where the endless energy comes from.

On Asimov. I can't confirm those exact terms. My recollection is that in the novel Eternals are safe because they live outside Time, not because of a worn device, so check the text before citing it. The wrist generator is your invention either way, and the function you describe is clear.

Is it really perpetual motion? Not quite, and the difference is useful. A perpetual motion machine makes energy from nothing. Your device is a tap on a reservoir. Total energy is conserved across all three domains, but from inside the Hadron Domain it looks like a violation, because energy appears with no hadronic source. The Phari would never call it perpetual motion. Earthly scientists who found one would, and that could be a nice scene.

 A source that fits your own canon. Your Dimensional Structure diagram says the original ground state was low-energy and symmetrical, and the Huaoshy later altered it. The universe is therefore sitting in a raised-energy configuration. The 152 device could tap the energy stored in that altered structure. That has a built-in stake: drain enough of it and the universe relaxes back toward the ground state, which might eventually undo the Final Reality and restore hadron time travel. It would also give Nyrtia, the Phari and the Huaoshy a reason to restrict the device. If you prefer a simpler source, "a vast Hierion Domain reservoir" works, but it has no stakes.

Two practical notes

• The usual objection is waste heat. A real tap needs somewhere to dump entropy. The tinker-toy answer is that the energy arrives in an ordered, work-like form, so the device runs cool.
• In the EFU the Observer Base sees every human's femtobot endosymbiont. A device pulling energy across the domain boundary would be hard for Nyrtia and Anthony to miss, which gives you an easy way to bring them in.

A hook from the physiotime idea. In your canon, a Reality Change gives people analogues instead of erasing them. A wearer who stays tethered to their original self would then exist alongside their own analogue in the new Reality. That is a clean setup for a meeting of the two, and it connects to your "mind clone" term.

Should the energy source be the altered Dimensional Structure, with the relaxation danger, or the simpler reservoir?

image source

 Note: I called this blog post "152" because this is the 152nd blog post in 2026 for the wikifiction blog. 

Related Reading: Back at the end of 2009,  in a blog post titled "Wearable Technology in Fiction", I mentioned the "physiotime generator".

The Historical Archive.  At the start of 2022, I wrote a story about the First Reality Change. That was before I began experimenting with generative AI and "Nyrtia" was a positronic robot who sometimes used a body pattern copied over from a First Reality woman named Qway. Nyrtia was constructed by Nahan, using both Qway's body and brain patterns. That story included a description of how positronic robots were able to create a part of Observer Base that was protected from the effects of Reality Changes. My story The Historical Archive made heavy use of Reality Simulation technology. There is a fairly detailed summary of The Historical Archive in my 2025 Decade in Review.

At the dawn of the Time Travel Era, several technological challenges has to be solved by the positronic robots. (1) The first problem was construction of a device that could send a robot (or a person) back into the past. As told in The Historical Archive, that problem was solved by R. Nyrtia working together with two Nyrturian scientists, Dodaqowż and Ursyña, who were part of a research project aimed at understanding the Observer Base teleportation device that had been captured from the pek. (2) A method was found to limit the "butterfly effect" that caused new Realities to diverge wildly from the course of the previous Reality. The positronic robots wanted to make relatively small modification to Earth's timeline, so they provided Earth with Temporal Momentum. (3) A third technological challenge was finding a way to create the special space-time bubble that came to be known as 'Eternity'. At the time of the first time travel trip (as told in The Historical Archive), that protected space-time bubble was an archive that held records from the First Reality. The contents of that archive would not be altered by a Reality Change.

Image by Flow.

 Saving Positronic Robot Gohrlay. The central drama in The Historical Archive was due to the fact that in the First Reality, there was no such thing as a portable physiotime generator that could protect a time travel who went back through time and changed the past. R. Nahan's plan was to go back in time and trade his life for that of R. Gohrlay. 

The Historical Archive includes an interesting device created by the Nyrturian scientists at Observer Base: a portable hierion generator. I'm now thinking that this primitive portable hierion generator could evolve into a functioning portable hierion field generator and then, eventually, a portable physiotime generator. Unfortunately, such a device was not invented before R. Nahan sacrificed himself for R. Gohrlay. The ideas arising from my chat session with Claude (above on this blog page) could be used for a sequel to The Historical Archive that would explain how the portable physiotime generator was first created by Nyrtia in the Second Reality.

Next: a short story titled "Phari Field Forever".

Images generated by Leonardo. Visit the Gallery of Movies, Book and Magazine Covers

Revenge

the first issue of Thrilling Wonder Stories

After reading "The Iron World" by Otis Kline and "The Conquest of Life", a story by Otto Binder (both in the August 1937 issue of Thrilling Wonder Stories) I went back to the very first issue (August 1936) of Thrilling Wonder Stories and read the "The Hormone Menace" and "Revenge of the Robot". From 1930 to 1936 the magazine had existed as Wonder Stories, but after being sold by Hugo Gernsback, it became Thrilling.

Previously, I became intrigued by Binder's interest in hormones and the possibility that Binder's stories about hormones might have influenced the writing of Robert Heinlein's story, "Methuselah's Children".

In the case of Kline, I suspect that his stories about robots had an influence on Isaac Asimov. 

interior art by Marco Marchioni

Back to the Future. "Revenge of the Robot" begins in the late 20th century when the roboticists of the world are competing to create the first fully autonomous humanoid robot. The competition ended on January 1, 2000. We all know how that turned out.

 Kline imagined that by 1999 it would be possible for passengers to be flown by "stratospheric rocket plane" from Europe to the U.S.A. in less than an hour and that a tunnel under the Atlantic ocean would allow people to zip from London to New York City in just half an hour.

robot contest requirements

 Ho Hum. One of the robots that is entered in the contest operates by telepathy, with a human mind remotely controlling the robot's body. Sadly for the inventor of this model of robot, the contest requires that the winning robot be self-controlled, not externally controlled. Nobody in the year 2000 seems at all impressed that telepathy can be used to control a humanoid robot's actions.

humanoid robots

I'm forced to conclude that in Kline's fictional world of the year 2000, telepathy is a well recognized phenomenon along with other advances like rocket planes and sub-oceanic transportation. Also, by the year 2000, several roboticists have each built humanoid robots that can autonomously move their bodies in a fairly human-like manner. However, only the robots built by Albert Bradshaw truly look like people and can move among humans without being recognized as robots. No roboticist has been able to make a complete artificial intelligence; we hear nothing of computers in "Revenge of the Robot" (computers were not invented until the 1940s).

Much of the plot in "Revenge of the Robot" reminds me of Isaac Asimov's fictional universe of positronic robots in which only one man, Dr. Han Fastolfe can make robot bodies that seem realistically human. Also, Asimov depicted the humaniform robot, Daneel, as having telepathic abilities.

Daneel

 Back to 2000 AD. In "Revenge of the Robot", Albert Bradshaw dies and his two humanoid robots are stolen by Hugh Grimes. Grimes enters the two robots in the competition, but they are unable to think creatively, although they can be controlled remotely by means of radio signals. 

Just before Grimes wins the contest, a third robot that had been created by Albert Bradshaw appears and reveals the fraud (hidden remote controls) being perpetrated by Grimes. This third robot looks exactly like the dead Albert Bradshaw and is intent on making sure that Grimes will not win the contest.

mind-body dualism

The robot that was constructed to have the physical appearance of Bradshaw reveals that inside its mechanical head is Bradshaw's biological brain, connected to the robot body by fine wires. Bradshaw explains that his brain is floating in a special liquid and it should last for 1000 years. Kline's 1937 story, "The Iron World", continues the tale 1000 years in the future, when robots are threatening to take over Earth and exterminate the human species.

interior art by Marchioni

 The Invisible Spy. "The Hormone Menace" begins with secret agent James Wistert, code designation S-23, of United North America being air-dropped into enemy territory on a dark night. The enemy is the Allied States of Europe. Since this is the late 20th century, James Bond has a Hi Tek™ Invisibility Cloak and so he can sneak into the closely guarded enemy base.

Giants. Inside the base, James discovers 8-foot-tall men, brutish and "driven like oxen" by armed guards. For the past 10 years, Director Bergmann (a biologist) has been preparing for war between Europe and North America. Successes of his military research and development plan include the Radio-wave Absorption Screen™ and the Super-Sonic Gun™.

By experimenting on human subjects, Bergmann discovered how to use hormones not only to create the "giants" but also multiple types of hormone-treated people some of whom never forget what they read (eidetists) and others with telepathic abilities, who when looking into the minds of the eidetists, can instantly solve math problems. 

"thrilling" adventure

 

from "The Hormone Menace"

Most important for Bergmann's weapons development program are his thyroid hormone-treated men who have super-human imagination and who write science fiction stories have developed devices such as the Super-Sonic Gun, which will soon allow Europe to defeat North America and rule the world.

interior art for "The Hormone Menace"

The most awesome weapon under development by the super-clever gland-men is an atomic-powered weapon that will shoot down aircraft. Having infiltrated the base a month earlier, secret agent Y-44 talks to the gland-man who is developing the atomic weapon and convinces him to detonate the device, destroying the entire research facility.

The Trilling Conclusion. Agent S-23 is captured and will be executed at dawn, but he is rescued by Y-44 and they escape just as the research facility is destroyed in an atomic explosion. All the talk of hormones must have gotten Otto's hormones flowing... at the end of the story it is revealed that Y-44 is a girl and S-23 plans his next mission to be a careful exploration of Y-44's physical features.

image source

Asimov wrote: "...even the silliest notions can undergo a sea change into something rich and strange in the hands of a skilled science fiction writer". I'm glad I searched back through Binder's stories about hormones to reach "The Hormone Menace". The destination is plenty strange, but for me it is inspiring in the context of a story that I am currently writing about an Interventionist attempt to speed technological advances on Earth by feeding advanced scientific ideas to ancient Greeks.

In my story, Empedocles ends up creating a legacy of strange philosophical ideas that almost seem to have been founded upon misunderstanding of scientific truths. Otto Binder achieved a similar effect in stories such as "The Hormone Menace" by twisting actual endocrinology into a perverted fictional form.

The Rossi Intervention

Back in the 1930s, Binder was seemingly in the story writing mode pioneered by Mary Shelly with the story Frankenstein. I view Frankenstein as a horror story that is anti-scientific in its depiction of the creation of an artificial life form. Similarly, Binder's story "The Hormone Menace" treads the line closer to comic book anti-science nonsense than to science fiction genre scientific plausibility. 

Clearly, Binder was not interested in scientific plausibility. His audience was not well informed about biology and the goal was to create some kind of "thrilling" military/spy adventure story; a bit of disposable fluff that could entertain readers of Thrilling Wonder Stories. It is interesting to contemplate how pulp magazine stories full of fictional biological nonsense must have impacted the young Asimov when he was going to college and learning biology. He must have been simultaneously motivated to avoid making his own science fiction stories not quite as glaringly silly but also lulled into a sense of complacency with respect to what story writers could get away with in the pulp magazines.

cover art by Howard V. Brown

 More Robots. Returning to the topic of old science fiction stories about robots, I read "Robot A-1" by Oscar J. Friend, published in the July 1939 issue of Startling Stories. The story begins in the far-off year of 1940 when a mechanical man, robot A-1 is on trial and ready to defend itself.

Mechanical Man on Trial in 1950

The Tri-octopus made the cover of Startling Stories. Having seen the cover art, the readers must have been puzzled to read the criminal charges against poor old A-1 which involves murder down in the subway tunnels below Times Square.

Hold on to your hat! interior art by Alex Schomberg

Hold on to your hat. But wait! Not only have the well spoken A-1 (who boasts of having "super-mental powers" and a social security number) and the 7-foot tall Tri-octopus (see the image to the right) been on the streets of New York City, there is yet another robot: a gigantic (hundreds of feet tall, each of its three feet weighs 5 tons) Tri-octopus that walks into Manhattan, crossing the Hudson River from New Jersey and malevolently spreading destruction in its wake.

Robot A-1 saves the day by using a raygun to disintegrate the huge Tri-octopus. However, when the giant mechanical monster is destroyed, poor A-1 is crushed under the weight of one of the 5-ton Tri-octopus feet.

interior art by Alex Schomburg

In the September 1940 issue of Super Science Stories, Isaac Asimov's first robot story "Robbie" appeared under the title "Strange Playfellow". It is easy to imagine that "Robot A-1" as one of the stories that annoyed Asimov with their destructive clanking robots, however Asimov claimed that "Robbie" was written in May of 1939, two months before "Robot A-1" was published. 

Asimov also turned away from depictions of genius inventors who created the first man-like robot by working alone in their garage. In "Robbie", Asimov began to develop his thinking about a robotics industry and robots engineered to include protections against them doing harm to humans.

Related Reading: "The Trial of Robot A-1" by G. W. Thomas

Next: two old time travel stories from the 1940s

Thrilling Wonder Stories was only one of many Thrilling pulp magazines

Binder

stranger than truth

I recently had reason to re-read the 1941 story "Methuselah's Children" by Robert Heinlein. In that story, Heinlein stated the fictional science idea that "the radioactive qualities of vitamins" have something to do with controlling the human lifespan.This is such a strange statement that I wondered how Heinlein had come to include it in his story.

Isaac Asimov had described the Adam Link stories about robots as having influenced the creation of his own positronic robot stories. Several years ago, I read a few of the Adam Link stories in an attempt to understand how they had contributed to Asimov's robot stories. As was the case for Campbell's robots in "The Last Evolution", the robot named Adam Link was very devoted to the man who designed and built him and, indeed, seemingly "born" with a deep desire to serve humans. 

cover by Ed Emshwiller

Adam Link had a special iridium brain, but Asimov told his readers that a positronic brain was made from platinum and iridium. Asimov also took an extra step towards explaining how a robot might be programmed so as to be loyal to humans (see the Laws of Robotics).

Otto Binder wrote many other stories besides the ones about robots. Another series of stories was about Anton York. In the first Anton York story, "The Conquest of Life", published in 1937, readers are told how Anton's father (Mathew York) had performed an experiment on Anton, injecting him with a mysterious elixir. 

Upon reaching the age of 55 while still having the youthful appearance of a man only 35 years old, Anton digs into the papers of his dead father and discovers mention of experiments involving "radiogens".

from "The Conquest of Life"

When I search the internet for "radiogens", I am led to webpages (example) about George Washington Crile. Crile was a surgeon, and one of his publications (from 1922) concerned the thyroid gland. Much of what was in that published report on the thyroid gland is what you might expect from a surgeon in 1922. However, there was also the following (Image A, below):

Image A. From the 1922 publication about the thyroid gland by Crile.

It is now known that thyroid hormone has receptors in most cells of the human body and it is important for the normal growth and function of the nervous system. Iodine is an atomic constituent of thyroid hormone but does not control "conductivity" of tissues.

timeline for iodine and thyroid (click image to enlarge)

Apparently, thyroid hormone was first isolated in 1915, but until the 1940s there was still debate about chemical structure of circulating thyroid hormone in the blood. In 1922, Crile seemingly had no concept of thyroid hormone and how it influences the body, so there is a huge amount of nonsense in Crile's book about the thyroid gland (see Image A, above).

In 1936, Crile published "The Phenomena of Life". This book was reviewed by the New York Times and it is not surprising if Otto Binder was influenced by Crile's weird views of human physiology. In his 1936 book, Crile presented his theory of "radiogens".

source

York at work in the laboratory

Crile's ideas about ionizing radiation inside cells as a source of energy for creating the electrical signals used to control the body were either ignored by other medical doctors or openly mocked as being crazy. Physiology research has revealed how cell metabolism creates cellular electric signals (action potentials) that rapidly propagate through the body.

Returning to the fictional tale of Anton York, we learn that the York elixir: "protects protoplasm from disease by increasing the energy of radiogens in the body". In his father's notebooks, Anton finds the "chemical formulae" that reveal the secret of longevity (Image B, below):

Image B: the secret of long life

Fictional Chemistry.  This "formula" is nonsense. Otto Binder lifted Grignard Reaction out of a chemistry book and zymase and pituitrin out of a biology book and combine them to create the imaginary Elixir M-7.

magic molecule of immortality

I've previously blogged about fictional chemistry and magic potions in science fiction. There is no objection to the creation of imaginary chemicals, but when devising fictional plot elements in the domain of living organisms, authors should take some care to avoid including outlandish imagined fictional biology. Earlier this year, I blogged about the popularity in science fiction stories that involve "accelerating" biological processes with a magic potion. Where is the boundary between 1) the laughably absurd departure from plausibility and 2) the clever Sci Fi plot element that can be "swallowed" by science fiction fans? In the case of Binder and his linked zymase and pituitrin molecules, I feel that he would have been better off to simply invent and create imaginary names for two new fictional proteins rather than recycle two existing names in a silly way. Binder's fictional science method for attaining immortality is like saying that you could create a faster-than-light spaceship by combining a VW Beetle and a Sopwith Camel.

cosmic rays

What is particularly annoying about Binder's approach to fictional science is that a single man working alone in his basement for a few years can create a spaceship, a time machine, a human-like robot or the Elixir of Life that confers immortality. It is difficult to resist calling such depictions of "scientific" discovery "anti-science fiction".

Unable to leave the "radiogen" theory alone, Binder went on to suggest that the tiny radiogen furnaces inside cells could capture energy from cosmic rays. In April 1937 the story "A Million Years Ahead" by Edmond Hamilton was published. I have no idea if that story by Hamilton influenced Binder; I suppose cosmic rays were "in the air" and if you wanted a Sci Fi energy source, why not use cosmic rays? Even if it makes no biological sense.

the power of cells

What I love about the non-nonsensical "radiogen" theory is that it seems similar to the femtobot endosymbionts that I imagine existing inside our bodies. In "The Conquest of Life", Binder goes on to state the hypothesis that immortality can be had through avoiding diseases and "resistance to disease is the electrocution of germs by radiogens". Binder champions this fictional science of radiogens over the conventional view that immune system cells such as macrophages combat bacteria and viruses.

It became popular in science fiction to imagine interstellar spaceships that were powered by atomic energy. In biology, it was not until the 1940s that mitochondria were shown to be the tiny components of "protoplasm" responsible for generating most of the human body's useful chemical energy in the form of ATP. In 1937, I suppose it was to be expected that some science fiction story teller such as Otto Binder would pretend that living cells are powered by atomic energy.

in the Ekcolir Reality

The "radiogen theory" and the idea that ionizing radiation was a key source of energy in cells is long forgotten among biologists, but its ghostly presence still exists in old science fiction stories such as "The Conquest of Life" and "Methuselah's Children".

I'm glad I read "The Conquest of Life" since it holds clues to origin of Heinlein's odd ideas about radioactive vitamins. 

By the end of "The Conquest of Life", Anton York has become an immortal god-like being who does not even need to eat. I suppose we are expected to accept that York's M-7 Elixir-boosted radiogens produce all the energy that his body needs by absorbing cosmic rays.

Time Portal

In my own stories set in the Exodemic Fictional Universe, I imagine that humans can be converted into artificial life forms composed of femtobots. Such "replicoid" copies of humans do not need to eat.

Having complained (above) about Otto Binder's unrealistic depiction of science and technological advances, the question must be asked: can I do any better? Recently, I imagined a science fiction novel called Time Portal that was written by Emma Phillips in one of the past Realities of Earth. In Time Portal, a research scientist and his assistant discover how to travel into the past. However, Time Portal was written in the early 1800s and we can't expect its author to have been very sophisticated in her thinking about the style of scientific research that would be common in the 20th century.

Related Reading: more cosmic rays and Gladiator

Next: more stories from Thrilling Wonder Stories

The Thrilling Science Test! The "two types of hormones" are found in "The Iron World" by Otis Kline.