A civil action might lie - could harboring the Man from Mars be construed as "maintaining an attractive nuisance?" Possibly.  But it was more likely that radically new rules of law must evolve.  Mike had already kicked the bottom out of both medicine and physics, even though the practitioners of such were still innocently unaware of the chaos facing them.  Harshaw dug far back into his memory and recalled the personal tragedy that relativistic mechanics had proved to be for many distinguished scientists.  Unable to digest it through long habit of mind, they had taken refuge in blind anger at Einstein himself and any who dared to take him seriously.  But their refuge had been a dead end; all that inflexible old guard could do was to die and let younger minds, still limber, take over.