Einstein never becomes a scientist, WWIII the ultimate result?

Dorozhand

Banned
So, I was musing yesterday about what it would have taken for a conventional WWIII to have happened between NATO and the Warsaw Pact. As I thought about possible POD's, probing further and further back into history, I suddenly found one that caught my attention.

What if Einstein had never become a scientist, the theories of relativity and E=mc2 were never forulated, physics continued (at least for a longer while) along Newtonian lines, Nuclear technology was never developed or concieved, and nuclear weapons never created.

Everything would be about the same until WWII, when, in the absence of even a theory regarding nuclear energy, weapon scientists concentrate instead on perfecting conventional weapons. The most significant fruit of this occuring in 1945, when the US invades Japan rather than nuking it as IOTL.

I then imagined a Japan under US influence, and a united Korea under Soviet influence (the USSR manages to grab the whole thing while the US is busy invading Japan into 1946).

This intensifies cold war tensions in the east. However, no third world war occurs immediately, because even without nukes a clash of titans would result in global catastrophe. However, in the 1960's, some kind of diplomatic crisis grips the world, occuring in either Europe, Asia, or Cuba, which precipitates a war between NATO and the WP.

I thought it was kind of interesting. Should I throw Cthulhu in there for good measure?
 
Einstein was not the only one exploring nuclear physics.Lizard,Fermi ,Heisenberg and many others were. Without Einstein there still have been a nuke. Instead of Hiroshima,maybe it would have been Moscow?
 

Dorozhand

Banned
Einstein was not the only one exploring nuclear physics.Lizard,Fermi ,Heisenberg and many others were. Without Einstein there still have been a nuke. Instead of Hiroshima,maybe it would have been Moscow?

But without Einstein ever having done ANYTHING for science, including E=mc2, would those men have had the logical basis for nuclear physics?
 
But without Einstein ever having done ANYTHING for science, including E=mc2, would those men have had the logical basis for nuclear physics?
Someone else would figure it out eventually, one of them actually might do it

I figure you set back nuclear physics by 5-20 years
 
Einstein and a group of friends formed a discussion group that was called The Olympian Academy and they discussed physics and philosophy, etc. There were probably many people working along similar paths.
 
Nuclear physics has very little todo with einstein. Special relativity is almost inevitable once you have michelsonmorlet interferometer results. Maybe it would take a dozen people ten years, rather than one guy a couple of months, but e=mc2 is direct consequence of lorenz contraction, etc.

It WILL happen before people observe fission. Which will, in turn, happen irrespective of einsteins existence.

So, no einstein is almost totally irrelevant here.

Believe me, i was a physics major.
 
But without Einstein ever having done ANYTHING for science, including E=mc2, would those men have had the logical basis for nuclear physics?

Yes they would have

Because Einstein didn't do any work on Nuclear Physics. He worked on the photoelectric effect (he got his nobel prize for this), reference frame problems and gravity (relativity)

In his later years he worked on Quantum Mechanics, building on his work with the photoelectric effect. At no point did he work on Nuclear Physics.

Einstein was without a doubt one of the most brilliant ever Physicists but let's make this clear, he did not create the entire framework of modern Physics himself, he did not even create the majority of it. By implying so you ignore the work of Rutherford, the Curies, Bohr, Heisenberg, Szilard and Fermi to name a few
 
You know I was thinking the same thing. I mean people always say that the world would of been better without atomic weapons but things might of been worst. Think about it, millions would of died in the invasion of Japan and who knows how many people would of died in a conventional WW3.
 
You know I was thinking the same thing. I mean people always say that the world would of been better without atomic weapons but things might of been worst. Think about it, millions would of died in the invasion of Japan and who knows how many people would of died in a conventional WW3.
Which of course also ignores just how close we've been to nuclear armageddon during the Cold War.
 
Which of course also ignores just how close we've been to nuclear armageddon during the Cold War.

But when you think about it, since we didn't, maybe it was worth it? Imagine if wars were still fought conventionally, at least with nukes it makes leaders think twice before rolling in the troops... Curse disguised as a blessing in some ways.
 
Top