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[1] On line as of 14 September 2019, possibly pirated.[2]

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 "De Rerum Natura," - "On the Nature of Things" - elaborated on that [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, somehow, it neither grew out of nor fitted into its social and economic milieu. Alexandrian science was a queer and rather inexplicable phenomenon. 
'Then one might mention the old Roman legend about the books of the Sibyl that contained mysterious information direct from the gods - 
'In other words, gentlemen, while you are right that any change in the course of past events, however trifling, 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. 
'This has been a Red Queen's race, if you remember your "Through the Looking Glass." In the Red, Queen's country, one had to run as fast as one could merely to stay in the same place. And so it was in this case! Tywood [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