The Red Queen's Race

'''Asimov, Isaac. "The Red Queen's Race."' Astounding'' January 1949. Collected in The Early Asimov or, Eleven Years of Trying. New York: Doubleday, 1972. Frequently reprinted and translated; see the Internet Speculative Fiction Database On line as of 14 September 2019, possibly pirated.

Premise has a book sent back in time via "micro-temporal translation." The book would be in Attic Greek and give enough information about 20th-c. science (primarily chemistry) to — let's mix metaphors and say — kick-start or reinforce the abortive ancient Greek flowering of science and mechanics. As the philosopher who did the translating tells the investigating authorities:

'The didactic Roman poet Lucretius, in his [...] "On the Nature of Things" - elaborated on [... atomic] theory and throughout manages to sound startlingly modern. 'In Hellenistic times, Hero built a steam engine and weapons of war became almost mechanized. The period has been referred to as an abortive mechanical age, which came to nothing because [...] it neither grew out of nor fitted into its social and economic milieu. [...] ¶ 'In other words, gentlemen, while you are right that any change in the course of past events [...] would have incalculable consequences, and while I also believe that you are right in supposing that any random change is much more likely to be for the worse than for the better, I must point out that you are nevertheless wrong in your final conclusions. 'Because this is the world in which the Greek chemistry text was sent back. '[... The man] who sent back the book] may have thought he was creating a new world, but it was I who prepared the translations, and I took care that only such passages as would account for the queer scraps of knowledge the ancients apparently got from nowhere would be included.

See for a scientifically-sophisticated discussion of the implications of a device that could send matter to a different time, and for the broad point of how the sciences are embedded in their cultures and thereby constrained in what can be discovered and/or what the larger cultural results might be of new scientific knowledge.

RDE, finishing, 14Sep19