"O Gostak e os Doshes" por Miles J. Breuer, MD ; publicado pela primeira vez em Amazing Stories , março de 1930 , reeditado em uma série de antologias e em Avon Fantasy Reader No. 10, 1949 que está disponível no Internet Archive . Há uma resenha no Alex Kasman 's Ficção Matemática . O texto completo está disponível em Wikisource .
Se você leu em uma antologia por volta de 1985, isso poderia ter sido O Tesouro da Casa Arbor de obras-primas de ficção científica (que foi republicado de forma ligeiramente abreviada como Grandes contos de ficção científica ), ou talvez Histórias incríveis : 60 anos da melhor ficção científica .
Aqui está um trecho da história:
"According to fiction writers, to switch into the t dimension, some sort of apparatus with an electrical field ought to be necessary. It is not. You need nothing more to rotate into the t dimension than you do to stop the moon and make the trees move as you ride down the road; or than you do to turn the cubes upside down. It is a matter of relativity."
I had ceased trying to wonder or to understand.
"Show me!" was all I could gasp.
"The success of this experiment in changing from the z to the t co-ordinate has depended largely on my lucky discovery of a favourable location. It is just as, when you want the moon to ride the tree-tops successfully, there have to be favourable features in the topography or it won't work. The edge of this building and that little walk between the two rows of Norway poplars seems to be an angle between planes in the z and t dimensions. It seems to slope downward, does it not?—Now walk from here to the end and imagine yourself going upward. That is all. Instead of feeling this building behind and above you, conceive it as behind and below. Just as on your ride by moonlight, you must tell yourself that the moon is not moving while the trees ride by. Can you do that? Go ahead, then." He spoke in a confident tone, as though he knew exactly what would happen.
O título é explicado no artigo da Wikipedia sobre Gostak :
Gostak is a meaningless noun that is used in the phrase "the gostak distims the doshes", which is an example of how it is possible to derive meaning from the syntax of a sentence even if the referents of the terms are entirely unknown.
[. . . .]
Coined in 1903 by Andrew Ingraham, the sentence became more widely known through its quotation in 1923 by C. K. Ogden and I. A. Richards in their book The Meaning of Meaning (p. 46).
Ogden and Richards refer to Ingraham as an "able but little known writer", and quote his following dialogue:
"Suppose someone to assert: The gostak distims the doshes. You do not know what this means; nor do I. But if we assume that it is English, we know that the doshes are distimmed by the gostak. We know too that one distimmer of doshes is a gostak. If, moreover, the doshes are galloons, we know that some galloons are distimmed by the gostak. And so we may go on, and so we often do go on."
[. . . .]
In Amazing Stories, Dr. Miles Breuer wrote a story, now considered a classic, titled "The Gostak and the Doshes" whose protagonist pops into an alternate world in which the phrase is a political slogan that induces sufficient umbrage throughout the populace to declare justified, righteous war. Other writers have picked up on the reference, notably David Gerrold.