 When Mitch rides the cart into the steam tunnels, the viewer briefly  sees the quotation, "Against stupidity the gods themselves contend  in vain" scrawled on the left wall. These are the original words of  the German poet Friedrich Schiller. Relevant to the film, Isaac  Asimov named three separate stories "Against Stupidity", "The Gods  Themselves" and "Contend in Vain". He later combined them into a  1972 science fiction novel about a conspiracy by aliens who inhabit  a parallel universe with different physical laws than ours, and who  are trying to turn our Sun into a supernova in order to collect the  resulting energy for their use.