Fission not possible in this Universe.

hammo1j

Donor
WI the atom bomb was not possible full stop. Not just that it was not developed in time to be used. In TTL I am saying by the laws of physics it was not possible.

Fusion still ran its course otherwise the Sun that gave us life would not be stoked up. (By the way, capitalising the Sun is what we do like we capitalise God; is this something left over after Eygpt?)

But the Fusion or H Bomb requires the white hot fraying of atoms that can only in TTL be triggered by the incandescence of a fission reaction.

Wkwillis, like the clever bastard that he is, would definitely say that the laws of quantum physics would have to be violated and that normal matter could not exist in this universe. But in Alternative History universe I AM RA!

What about a curve of MeV's of binding energy where atoms could decay, but with a lazy "well I will, or I won't" type of dilemma.

So our POD is August 1945. The allies don't have the bomb because they can't have the bomb.

What next?
 
I think we capitalise Sun because it is a proper noun - like London, or Earth or Jupiter

I have often wished for an easy way of having this in a timeline

Have you read Elleander Morning ? There the nuclear bomb is not discovered until the 1980s IIRC. This seemed like a half answer

But what I really wanted was what you suggest - it not being possible

Best Regards
Grey Wolf
 
However, I DID come up with another answer, though it is hard to explain, especially at almost Midnight

That is that what we call Science is simply our current body of knowledge, composed of millions of minor strands and a few dozen major ones, all of which are then built on and built on until they collapse and that sub-section needs a radical overhaul in order to accommodate other ideas which are provably true but which no longer fit the model.

Thus goodbye to Newtonian physics etc and welcome to Quantum Mechanics

But it has ALWAYS seemed to me that because the body of scientific knowledge develops in this way, then it IS possible to reach a certain point without having brought along with you all the associated discoveries of OTL because the meshing of theories at the time in the ATL did not link together in the same way

Its difficult to explain what I mean. Hell, I even wrote an essay on it once which is online but even that on rereading never quite explained everything in the amount of clarity and detail that I want

I think part of the idea is that basically science is ALWAYS wrong. It is always a best-guess system of models which work until the evidence proves them to be bollocks. Thus, a different collection of models would emerge in a different timeline, would then be built on differently, would then turn into a different body of science and somethings which only became clear very late here would be clear a lot earlier, and some things here which we discovered a long time ago may in fact take a hell of a lot longer to be understood in any practical way

Am I making any sense whatsoever to anybody but me???

Grey Wolf
 

hammo1j

Donor
Grey Wolf

Try telling that to the GI's that are about to invade the North Island of Japan.

Already the Kamikazes have taken out half their number? (as you already suspected).

They will win but at what price as the Soviet Union attacks the weakly defended flanks in order to grab the territory next for the big global standoff to see who has the biggest sacs.

Sorry had to violate laws of physics but what if there was no easy end to wars. Would we still be up for it.

ie would the battleground be continental Europe or USA and not some far flung foreign field?
 
Grey Wolf said:
However, I DID come up with another answer, though it is hard to explain, especially at almost Midnight

That is that what we call Science is simply our current body of knowledge, composed of millions of minor strands and a few dozen major ones, all of which are then built on and built on until they collapse and that sub-section needs a radical overhaul in order to accommodate other ideas which are provably true but which no longer fit the model.

Thus goodbye to Newtonian physics etc and welcome to Quantum Mechanics

But it has ALWAYS seemed to me that because the body of scientific knowledge develops in this way, then it IS possible to reach a certain point without having brought along with you all the associated discoveries of OTL because the meshing of theories at the time in the ATL did not link together in the same way

Its difficult to explain what I mean. Hell, I even wrote an essay on it once which is online but even that on rereading never quite explained everything in the amount of clarity and detail that I want

I think part of the idea is that basically science is ALWAYS wrong. It is always a best-guess system of models which work until the evidence proves them to be bollocks. Thus, a different collection of models would emerge in a different timeline, would then be built on differently, would then turn into a different body of science and somethings which only became clear very late here would be clear a lot earlier, and some things here which we discovered a long time ago may in fact take a hell of a lot longer to be understood in any practical way

Am I making any sense whatsoever to anybody but me???

Grey Wolf

No not really. LOL!

Science is not always wrong. What you are doing is falling into a logical trap. Because some theories are later shown to be inadequate they therefore must have been in error. Not so.

For example, in the ancient world people thought the earth was flat, perhaps disc shaped, held up by elephants or a turtle or whatever. In the light of modern experience and knowledge these theories are clearly wrong. Then Erasthenes calculated the circumfrence of the earth to within a value very close to modern ones. Unfortunately, the earth is not spherical it is more like apear shape.

Yet while he was not entirely correct he was not wrong. The theory that the earth is a sphere is clearly closer to being correct than ones where it is portrayed as a flat disc.

Newtonian physics has been superceded by quantum mechanics yet NASA, JPL and all the others still use Newton's equations and Laws to calculate space probe trajectories because it much easier to do than use quantum calculations. The probes dutifully arrive at Jupiter after years of travelling and arrive within a second or so of the predicted time. Newton was not completely correct in his understanding of the cosmos but he was not wrong.
 
MarkA said:
No not really. LOL!

Science is not always wrong. What you are doing is falling into a logical trap. Because some theories are later shown to be inadequate they therefore must have been in error. Not so.

For example, in the ancient world people thought the earth was flat, perhaps disc shaped, held up by elephants or a turtle or whatever. In the light of modern experience and knowledge these theories are clearly wrong. Then Erasthenes calculated the circumfrence of the earth to within a value very close to modern ones. Unfortunately, the earth is not spherical it is more like apear shape.

Yet while he was not entirely correct he was not wrong. The theory that the earth is a sphere is clearly closer to being correct than ones where it is portrayed as a flat disc.

Newtonian physics has been superceded by quantum mechanics yet NASA, JPL and all the others still use Newton's equations and Laws to calculate space probe trajectories because it much easier to do than use quantum calculations. The probes dutifully arrive at Jupiter after years of travelling and arrive within a second or so of the predicted time. Newton was not completely correct in his understanding of the cosmos but he was not wrong.

Well, there are different definitions of wrong

Obviously none of them was TOTALLY wrong because their theories fitted the available evidence of their periods and worked for what was being done then

But wrong as in not totally right, I think yes. They explain things and can be built upon successfully, but are they actually right ? Getting the right answer by the wrong route maybe doesn't discredit the route entirely, but when later it begins to throw up wrong answers then people know that there is something fundamentally wrong with it

Can you not see how a different set of theories could build up which are right for that period but later proved to be wrong ? How these can be built on ? How you could have all we have now working from a different body of science that has never heard of Quantum Mechanics. That the discovery of nuclear fission could be so outside the current body of science that its discovery won't occur until a radical change has worked its way through the raft of theories that may now be held together by string alone but which in the amendment to the amendment and the special exemption to the primary rule etc all still make enough sense for science and technology to function in an ATL ?

Grey Wolf
 
Grey Wolf said:
Well, there are different definitions of wrong

Obviously none of them was TOTALLY wrong because their theories fitted the available evidence of their periods and worked for what was being done then

But wrong as in not totally right, I think yes. They explain things and can be built upon successfully, but are they actually right ? Getting the right answer by the wrong route maybe doesn't discredit the route entirely, but when later it begins to throw up wrong answers then people know that there is something fundamentally wrong with it

Can you not see how a different set of theories could build up which are right for that period but later proved to be wrong ? How these can be built on ? How you could have all we have now working from a different body of science that has never heard of Quantum Mechanics. That the discovery of nuclear fission could be so outside the current body of science that its discovery won't occur until a radical change has worked its way through the raft of theories that may now be held together by string alone but which in the amendment to the amendment and the special exemption to the primary rule etc all still make enough sense for science and technology to function in an ATL ?

Grey Wolf

Uh, mate, since science is about the set of things that can adequately explained observed reality, has a mechanism, is falsifiable, can generate verifiable predictions, and contains the least number of terms. It is always an approximation. Right and wrong has nothing to do with it.

Just consider your example, Newtonian Mechanics. Newtonian mechanics was adequate for centuries, and it wasn't until the late 19th century when advances in optics and electromagnetism started to show some oblique problems with Newtonian mechanics that the first idea of the Quantum was conceived (mostly as mathematical trick to get rid of the inconvenient stuff lying between the integer values), and it took a few decades to go from that to quantum mechanics. So your charaterisation of science often needing radical overhauls is in error, further, because for most purposes, for instance, classical mechanics is more than adequate, and indeed QM is inapplicable - you don't do a path integral formuation for calculating the trajectory of a rocket. The same goes for classical and statistical thermodynamics, Darwinian evolution and modern evolution/ genetics, etc.

For a whole different system with different theories to emerge and which generate a sufficiently similar set of predictions that engineering can build on it to give us modern civilization is almost inconceivable. And more importantly, it is very hard to see how such a system is materially different if it generates the same set of predictions.
 
hammo1j said:
So our POD is August 1945. The allies don't have the bomb because they can't have the bomb.

What next?

IMO, this belongs in ASB (they can change the laws of physics, right?)

You could also have a concerted effort by the scientists working on the bomb projects in the US and the UK to just deny that it was possible and spare the world the horrors of the bomb.

Operation Olympia (or was it Olympus?) is launched and is a bloody mess, possibly even a failure the first time around. MacArthur resigns (by choice or otherwise), much as Ike would have had to do had Overlord failed. With the US (and presumably now UK via ANZAC) tied down trying to invade Japan, Stalin "liberates" the eastern coast of mainland asia, propping up comrades Kim, Mao, and Minh on his way south.

Ike is sent to the Pacific. Bradley promoted to replace him.

A second invasion of the home islands, this a joint strike with the Russians from the west and the Western Allies from the east (there's some irony) occurs a year or more later (if it's after 1948, we'll need a different president). This one is successful, yet it results in the partition of Japan, rather than complete US occupation.

After that, there may be a Cold War, simply because most people are generally pacifistic after such a bloddy conflict as WWII, or a general world war again a few years later.

If the former, then there would be a Japanese War and probably more fighting in the Middle East with direct involvement from the superpowers instead of just the proxy support they received in OTL.
 
Definatly ASB.

The far more pressing concern to the Japanese of the soviet invasion is still there. It wouldn't be that much longer before they surrender I bet.
 

Hendryk

Banned
Leej said:
The far more pressing concern to the Japanese of the soviet invasion is still there. It wouldn't be that much longer before they surrender I bet.
I second that. Even in OTL, the Soviet invasion of Japanese-held territories in East Asia was the decisive factor for Japan's surrender, not the destruction of Hiroshima and Nagazaki. So without nuclear fission, the surrender may take place a few weeks later at most, say early September 1945.
According to Tsuyoshi Hasegawa, director of the Center for Cold War Studies at the University of California, Santa Barbara, Japan may have surrendered months earlier if it hadn't been for the fact that the middleman they chose for the negociations, the Soviet Union, was less than interested in earnestly forwarding their overtures to the USA. Hasegawa's theory is that Stalin deliberately delayed the process so that Japan would still be fighting after Germany's surrender, and he could make a move on the Japanese sphere of influence. The book is called Racing the Enemy: Stalin, Truman, and the Surrender of Japan.
 
About thirty years ago I read a couple of books that sort of dealt with this subject.

"The Last Year of the Old World" was in a universe where the USA can't get fission to work in 1945 and history diverges.... (the author, whose name I've forgotten , also wrote a book called "Queen Victoria's Bomb", in which fission is easier to achieve...

"The Jesus Factor" was a thriller where the superpowers are unwilling to reveal the 'truth' ... that fission works with stationary devices - so that nuclear tests can be carried out - but that nuclear devices moving through a gravitational field - e.g. bombs and missiles - just don't work. Hiroshima and Nagasaki weren't hit by A-bombs . but by something like a 'dirty' conventional bomb
 
I think part of the idea is that basically science is ALWAYS wrong. It is always a best-guess system of models which work until the evidence proves them to be bollocks.

Grey Wolf

Yep. Science is a complex approximation based in part on contingent historical factors and personalities. Introduce butterflies and you might get a different approximation.
 
The easiest way to ge this is to postulate that there is no U-235. Just does Not exist. All the Trans Uraniumics remain laboratory creations from atom smashers.
With no Breeder reactors to produce Trans Uraniumics, scientists believe that is all they could ever be.

So No Pile under the Chicago University Stadium, and No Manhattan Project.

?Where does the 900.000 Manhours and the millions of dollars go ITTL?

?What effect on the War do these other Projects Have?

?What do the Germans do with the Resources they used on their Atom Programs?

Better AIP Subs?, More Jets Earlier?

Given whe still end up with Operation Downfall.
I see Operation Olympus being postponed due to Weather [Typhoon] By the time the Typhoon is over, so is Operation Olympus.
Instead the planners who wanted to bypass the troops on Kyshu prevail and in early Decembre, 21 Divisions of American and Commonwealth Troops land just north of Tokyo, in Operation Coronet.

Whe have 3 extra months of Firebombing including Hiroshima, Nagasaki, and other cities.
Whe have the Russians in Control of Korea, Manchuria and pushing south into China.
Whe have a much larger pull down in Europe, and no Marchall Plan.
No UN meeting in San Francisco,
So the Info about the Russian treatment of the Free Polish Delegation, Makes a difference in the US position on Poland, and Russia in North Japan.
 
If fission were not possible, there would be no Earth as we know it. No fission, internal heat in the Earth's core, so no volcanism. Also, no short-lived radionuclides, and the Earth never losses most of its original water, so water-world with no land. Plus, other ridiculous problems. Also, the POD is the Big Bang.

Please move to ASB.

Simon ;)
 
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