Music of the future (Hans Dominik)

Hans Dominik's dream of the future is a technical and scientific future story. It appeared in 1921 in the annual book series " Das Neue Universum " (Volume 42) and in the collection of short stories by Hans Dominik "Ein neue Paradies", published in 1977 by Heyne Verlag as paperback No. 3562.

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A burning problem in Germany after the First World War is the procurement of fuel. In this short story, Hans Dominik tackles the problem and tells how he imagines the use of nuclear energy .

To the short story

This short story is right at the front of "New Universe" volume 42 from page 1. In the same volume on page 106 there is a report about how much coal production in Germany has fallen due to the chaos of war, while prices have risen sharply at the same time.

At the beginning, Hans Dominik had his hero Professor Hansen say "The struggles that have been shaking the sick body of Europe for almost ten years in ever new showers of fever ultimately revolve around the energy supplies, the coal deposits". Shortly afterwards, Professor Hansen manages to bring the atomic structure to collapse in his laboratory with the help of extremely fast electrons - a motif that Hans Dominik has already used in A New Paradise and An Expedition into Space .

Professor Hansen still needs five years before he can drive a small steam engine for the first time using the heat of the decaying atoms. And only twenty years later can he convert all the energy of the decaying atoms directly into electricity, which is still a utopia today. At this point in time, coal is only needed by the chemical industry - all of the energy that people need comes from the atomic nuclei.

In 1965, Professor Hansen reported an exciting astronomical observation: a dark star suddenly glowed brightly and became so hot that there is now only a gas cloud floating in space. Professor Hansen found the cause of an atomic disintegration that could no longer be stopped, a nuclear fire. He closes with the warning: "Since we started using the mass decay as a source of energy, the new danger has arisen that this decay will affect our planet". With this, Hans Dominik warns decades before the first atomic bomb about the dangers associated with the use of nuclear energy.