We've got the evil Professor Tode (who modifies an atom-smasher into a time machine that travels to the Palaeolithic and to Atlantis), a fatherly older professor, his beautiful young daughter (menaced by evil Tode), casually written racist pronouncements (by Rousseau), and our hero scientist, the dashing Jim Dent. But my favorite sentence was the brief description of quantum mechanics, which I didn’t expect in a 1930 science fiction tale.
Michael Main
The Planck-Bohr quantum theory that the energy of a body cannot vary continuously, but only by a certain finite amount, or exact multiples of this amount, had been the key that unlocked the door.

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(3)
  1. “The Atom-Smasher” by Victor Rousseau, Astounding Stories of Super-Science, May 1930.
  2. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . written by Victor Rousseau
    . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . translated by Alison Stewart
  3. alternative title.
    “The Atom Smasher” by Victor Rousseau, in Outlaws of the Sun and Other Tales to Astound (Black Dog Books, March 2018).
  4. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . written by Victor Rousseau
  5. audio reading.
    “The Atom Smasher” by Victor Rousseau, in Astounding Stories 05: May 1930, coordinated by Alan Winterrowd (LibriVox, November 2013) [audio] [Audio collection accessed at https://librivox.org/astounding-stories-05-may-1930-by-ray-cummings/ on 8 April 2022.].
  6. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . written by Victor Rousseau