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"Always listen to experts. They'll tell you what can't be done and why. Then do it."
- Robert Heinlein

Steering a Star  
  Steering a star, altering its path, taking it to a new location.  

To accomplish this, to swerve their star from its course, the globemen made use of a simple physical principle. You know that a round, spinning body, moving across or through any medium, changes its direction if the rate of its spinning is changed. A ball that rolls across a smooth table without spinning at all will move in a straight line. But if the ball spins as it rolls it will move in a curved line, the amount and direction of curve depending upon the amount and direction of spin. Now their sun, which had rotated at the same rate for ages, had rolled through the ether for ages on the same great course, never swerving...

The problem, then, was to increase their sun's rate of spin, and to accomplish this they gathered all their science. A mighty tower was erected over their city, on whose great top-platform were placed machines which could generate an etheric ray or vibration of inconceivable power, a ray which could be directed at will...

This done, they waited until the moment calculated by their astronomers, then aimed the great projector-tube at the edge of their sun that was rotating away from them, and turned on the ray.

From Crashing Suns, by Edmond Hamilton.
Published by Popular Fiction Publishing Co. in 1928
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Additional resources:
  More Ideas and Technology from Crashing Suns
  More Ideas and Technology by Edmond Hamilton
  Tech news articles related to Crashing Suns
  Tech news articles related to works by Edmond Hamilton

Steering a Star-related news articles:
  - Moving Suns To Different Galactic Neighborhoods

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