"'One gigantic neutron?'"?
-Poul Anderson, The Enemy Stars, 5, p. 35.
Are Maclaren and his colleagues investigating some other kind of hypothetical object or did they not yet know about neutron stars in their timeline?
1932 discovery of neutrons
1933 proposal of neutron stars
1958 publication of "We Have Fed Our Sea"/The Enemy Stars
1962 discovery of the Scorpius X-1 radio source
1965 discovery of the Crab Pulsar
1967 proposal that spinning neutron stars would emit radiation
1967 realization that Scorpius X-1 was an accreting neutron star
1 comment:
Kaor, Paul!
I think it's simpler to understand THE ENEMY STARS as a late early phase work by Anderson. I have argued that his early phase (which I dated from 1947 to 1958) marked the period when Anderson was still learning, in many ways, how to write. Including, in this context, how to integrate with minimum awkwardness the scientific knowledge available at the time into a story at the time it was written. This "awkwardness" would explain how handled neutron stars in THE ENEMY STARS not quite as satisfactorily as he later would have.
Sean
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