Alternate Science History

Chrispi

Chrispi

When you look at the bulk of AHs on this site, or AHs in general, they tend to be focused too much on government and the military, unfortunately, and too little on the development of science, except, perhaps, as an afterthought. WI more alternate histories had science as their central focus, rather than politics?

Perhaps I had better apply this question to my own British North America TL:

With a late 1776 POD, Karl Friedrich Gauss is born on time (30 April, 1777) and receives the same name ATL, but will he stick with math or move to linguistics?

What happens to Antoine Lavoisier, presumably, without a French Revolution? And the other French scientists? Laplace? d'Alembert? Charles? Fourier?
 
Grey Wolf

Grey Wolf

Donor
I once tried in a very long post (maybe accessible at the original IF) to explain my understanding of Science. I think in general I failed

The gist of it was supposed to be that current Science is a body of rules which works for what can be proven

Discover something outside this proof, or an anomaly not categorised, and modern science has to warp to accomodate it

In essence this puts science at the mercy of the over-arcing idea which becomes a kind of dictator. Of course time travel is not possible, Einstein's theory of relativity proved it cannot work as an independent idea

But why not ? Because some HUMAN said so. He may have been a genius in categorising and relating what was provable, but what was conjecture was simply forced to sit within the bounds that his Science grew from out of the observable

In all of human history, such bounds, whether Coppernicus or Newton, have shown themselves to be but a best-fit understanding for the time, and that anomalies not only are viable but form the basis for the next level up of understanding

Maybe because he was involved so closely in the theoretical background for the nuclear bomb, an observable, Einstein is so revered today that people dare not think his over0arcing theories wrong. Even when applied to unobservables. And even considering all past empiracal evidence

Grey Wolf
 
Chrispi

Chrispi

My view of science in AH is that the same discoveries will be made...sooner or later.

Take Karl Friedrich Gauss, my BNA TL has him develop the theory of differential forms fully, so that not only does he discover what we call Gauss' Theorem but Green's, Stokes' and d'Alembert's as well, among others.*

Relatively "minor" deviations like this from history will have the gravest of consequences later on. But will this discovery quicken or delay the theory of electromagnetism?

*The rub is how to get forms and manifolds using an eighteenth-century mathematical framework. I think it is possible, but would require assumptions that strain credibility, like the anticommutative rule dx dy = -dy dx.
 

Tom_B

Einstein

Grey Wolf said:
I once tried in a very long post (maybe accessible at the original IF) to explainMaybe because he was involved so closely in the theoretical background for the nuclear bomb, an observable, Einstein is so revered today that people dare not think his over0arcing theories wrong. Even when applied to unobservables. And even considering all past empiracal evidence

Grey Wolf
Click to expand...

That is the popular conception but I challenge it. Fission weapons could have been developed without relativity. I once took an AFIT course on nuclear weapon physics. The really important equation is the diffusion equation which does not come from relativity. (to make the leap to fusion you need quantum mechanics which Einstein not only did not develop but was actually resistant to).

Also several pieces of relativity were already in place from other scientists--Fitzgerald, Lorentz, etc. What made Einstein a Cult Figure was not his math but the philosophy of relativism what he wrapped around it.

Heisenberg and Bohr were at least equal to Einstein and Schroedinger was smarter than all of them but Schroedinger was a Platonist and God forbid that Platonism become popular.

Tom
 
Chrispi

Chrispi

Tom_B said:
[T]he really important equation is the diffusion equation which does not come from relativity. (to make the leap to fusion you need quantum mechanics which Einstein not only did not develop but was actually resistant to).
Click to expand...

Einstein is one of the founders of quantum mechanics, also, with his work on the photoelectric effect (this, and not relativity, was what earned him the Nobel Prize in 1922.) Einstein's resistance to QM lay not in the fact that "God does not play dice" but the fact that the observer is playing God with reality.
 

NapoleonXIV

Banned
I've put this out several times before but I've gotten no answer. Maybe because the right people didn't see it. I'll try again.

Michael Faraday invented the electric generator and the electric motor in 1837. The electric motor, however, was apparently not in a usable form. This usable electric motor was one of the main inventions of Nikola Tesla, some 50 years later. Considering the great use of the electric motor (It runs just about every household appliance there is, even having some place in computers. Additionally it has made the modern factory possible by eliminating the need for the literally hundreds of dangerous pulley systems which operated all the machinery in 19thc factories.) why did it take fifty years?
 
Chrispi

Chrispi

Stirling Engines and Fluidic Computers

First I have to address Tom B's assertion that relativity was unimportant to the development of nuclear weapons. Controlling nuclear fission requires special relativity; without it one would be at a loss to explain why so much energy is relased; there is a reason why E = mc^2 is the most celebrated equation in science!

Anyway, back to my favorite TL. I have Stirling engines in the early-to-mid 1800s and fluidic computers in the early-to-mid 1900s. I'm not sure whether I will use binary or ternary computers; that debate is still raging in my mind and will depend on how I develop the telegraph. (What we call the internet is still called the telegraph ATL.)
 

Tom_B

Ofh the Banility

chrispi said:
First I have to address Tom B's assertion that relativity was unimportant to the development of nuclear weapons. Controlling nuclear fission requires special relativity; without it one would be at a loss to explain why so much energy is relased; there is a reason why E = mc^2 is the most celebrated equation in science!

)
Click to expand...

So very glad you brought that canard up. My Major /PhD professor in Nuclear Weapons Physics remarked that the energy released in fission is only a little more than predicted by Coulomb repulsion. So history's most Hyped Equation is irrelevant. If you don't have the diffusion equation (which does not need relativity except as a minor correction) relativity gets you nowhere.
 
Chrispi

Chrispi

Tom_B said:
So very glad you brought that canard up. My Major /PhD professor in Nuclear Weapons Physics remarked that the energy released in fission is only a little more than predicted by Coulomb repulsion. So history's most Hyped Equation is irrelevant. If you don't have the diffusion equation (which does not need relativity except as a minor correction) relativity gets you nowhere.
Click to expand...
I certainly don't disagree with you about the diffusion equation, but nevertheless I have a hard time agreeing that relativity is irrelevant. After all, the entire point of nuclear fission is that the resultant particles weigh less than their inputs. Coulomb repulsion or no, there isn't a way for Newtonian mechanics to deal with this real violation of Conservation of Mass. Perhaps an AH physicist could graft a mass-energy equivalence to Newton's laws but that's inelegant, or one could posit that the mass is "lost to the aether."
 

d80tb7

Grey Wolf said:
I once tried in a very long post (maybe accessible at the original IF) to explain my understanding of Science. I think in general I failed

The gist of it was supposed to be that current Science is a body of rules which works for what can be proven

Discover something outside this proof, or an anomaly not categorised, and modern science has to warp to accomodate it

In essence this puts science at the mercy of the over-arcing idea which becomes a kind of dictator. Of course time travel is not possible, Einstein's theory of relativity proved it cannot work as an independent idea

But why not ? Because some HUMAN said so. He may have been a genius in categorising and relating what was provable, but what was conjecture was simply forced to sit within the bounds that his Science grew from out of the observable

In all of human history, such bounds, whether Coppernicus or Newton, have shown themselves to be but a best-fit understanding for the time, and that anomalies not only are viable but form the basis for the next level up of understanding

Maybe because he was involved so closely in the theoretical background for the nuclear bomb, an observable, Einstein is so revered today that people dare not think his over0arcing theories wrong. Even when applied to unobservables. And even considering all past empiracal evidence

Grey Wolf
Click to expand...

I think this is a fair point. I think that through history there has been a general reluctance to change scientific opinion, when evidence has mounted to show that old theories are incorrect: the adoption of quantum mechanics being a classic example. This is less true today though, in the scientific community it is well known that the two great theories of modern physics, reletivity and quantum mechanics do not sit well with each other, and there is a great deal of work being done to try to sort this out.

Just as a side point, Einstein's equations specifically do make time travel possible, just extremely hard.

As for atomic bombs, the E=MC^2 equation is just part of the problem. I would guess that in order to make a bomb you need a good understanding how an atom is layed out, most importantly including the role of the neutron (as a side point the neutron was not discovered until 1932: for all those people who want an atomic ww2 have it discovered 10 years earlier and you're in business). I could imagine that it might be possible to investigate nuclear fission, without actually knowing the E=MC^2 equation, but work is going to be a lot slower without any idea of the theory behind it.
 

wkwillis

Starting at the top...

1. Einstein did his work on relativity in 1905. Isotopes weren't discovered until 1922. The neutron was not discovered until 1932. Fission wasn't discovered until 1939, though people were working on other concepts for nuclear chain reaction weapons as early as the discovery of neutron moderation in 1936. The first atomic bomb patent was filed by Szilard then.

2. In science, things are either forbidden or compulsory. One of the things about relativity that bothered people is that time machines are compusory, meaning that if relativity is 'true', then time machines are possible. Granted, you have to be able to manipulate stellar masses, but given that, you can build time machines.
 
Chrispi

Chrispi

Newtonian mechanics fails in the atom because

  • Electron spin: it predicts that all revolving electrons will lose energy and crash into the nucleus within nanoseconds. Clearly, this does not happen, so the Newtonian framework of physics is, how to put it politely, incomplete. Relativity predicts an intrinsic electron spin of 1/2 that keeps it in a stable orbit.
  • Binding energy: without this very relativistic concept, our understanding of nuclear fission would be very incorrect (I touched on this in an earlier post, regarding mass-energy equivalence.)

Sorry, but you can't have the Bomb without relativity.
 
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