Let's say Einstein was never born. Would we have the atom bomb?

Einstein was very important in the development of modern physics, especially in areas involving atoms and quantum physics - like nuclear energy and nuclear weaponry. If he were to suddenly be erased from history, would we get the bomb, or nuclear power? If so, would the development be taken back a few decades?
 

mowque

Banned
Einstein was very important in the development of modern physics, especially in areas involving atoms and quantum physics - like nuclear energy and nuclear weaponry. If he were to suddenly be erased from history, would we get the bomb, or nuclear power? If so, would the development be taken back a few decades?

Yes, Einstein didn't actually build the bomb..you know this right?
 
I know. However, his scientific theories were integral to the development of nuclear fission - his formula for mass-energy equivalence, for instance. Also, he actually wrote to the president himself, encouraging him to pursue a nuclear weapons program.
 

mowque

Banned
I know. However, his scientific theories were integral to the development of nuclear fission - his formula for mass-energy equivalence, for instance. Also, he actually wrote to the president himself, encouraging him to pursue a nuclear weapons program.

Yes, I mean his influence was important to 'get the ball rolling' IMHO. But I think someone else would have put the pieces together soon enough. But I could be completely wrong here,:D

And another scientist would probably have been able to convince FDR..
 
Yes, I mean his influence was important to 'get the ball rolling' IMHO. But I think someone else would have put the pieces together soon enough. But I could be completely wrong here,:D

And another scientist would probably have been able to convince FDR..
How about Niels Bohr? Danish nukes :eek:
 
IIRC, the general consensus is that Special Relativity (the famed mass-energy equivalence equation E=MC^2) was floating around for a while, several other scientists were working towards it. What was probably quite a few years, even decades, off without Einstein was General Relativity, the unification of Special Relativity with Newton's Gravitational Law.

General Relativity doesn't actually contribute much towards nukes, so the answer would probably be that Special Relativity would be discovered within a decade of OTL (so ~1905-15). So we'd have the theory for it, but whether anyone would persuade politicians to fund a project to build one is another matter.

Quantum Mechanics (Photoelectric Effect) and Astrophysics (General Relativity) will be behind considerably, but that won't affect "important" political events much.
 
I heard that the Arabs had figured out the destructive potential of breaking the atom during the crusades... Arab Nukes in the Middle Ages :eek:
 
You know that Einsteins scientific work had absolutly nothing to do with nuclear physics? The only thing he did for the developement of atomic weapons was to sign a letter.
 
You know that Einsteins scientific work had absolutly nothing to do with nuclear physics? The only thing he did for the developement of atomic weapons was to sign a letter.
Isn't Special Relativity pretty useful for estimating the ammount of energy output from nuclear reactions?
 
Isn't Special Relativity pretty useful for estimating the ammount of energy output from nuclear reactions?

Yes and no. Yes, if you know the mass difference you can predict the released energy, but if you have to measure that you can also simply measure the energy output directly, so it is not necessary.

And while it may be usefull to calculate the energy released, it is totaly useless to calculate the critical mass or why neutrons split nucleui or why Uran 235 explodes but not Uran 238, or how you seperate the two, or why you need graphite to controll the reaction.

E=mc^2 only answers the question where this energy comes from, but don't tell you how to get it.
So without Einstein the researcher won't know why fission releases so much energy but they will still know it does, and will still be able to calculate the critical mass and build and use a bomb.
After all when Sarin was developed people didn't how it killed people, just that it was very good at it and still produced huge amounts of it
 
Yes and no. Yes, if you know the mass difference you can predict the released energy, but if you have to measure that you can also simply measure the energy output directly, so it is not necessary.

And while it may be usefull to calculate the energy released, it is totaly useless to calculate the critical mass or why neutrons split nucleui or why Uran 235 explodes but not Uran 238, or how you seperate the two, or why you need graphite to controll the reaction.

E=mc^2 only answers the question where this energy comes from, but don't tell you how to get it.
So without Einstein the researcher won't know why fission releases so much energy but they will still know it does, and will still be able to calculate the critical mass and build and use a bomb.
After all when Sarin was developed people didn't how it killed people, just that it was very good at it and still produced huge amounts of it
I'm not so sure. After all, without his explaination of brownian motion in terms of atoms, the very existence of atoms may remain a hotly debated subject. The butterflies from this in the scientific community will be immense.
 
I heard that the Arabs had figured out the destructive potential of breaking the atom during the crusades... Arab Nukes in the Middle Ages :eek:

Where did you hear that?

The thought that occured to me was this might be a POD for the earlier development of thermobaric weapons. As I understand it, sufficiently large thermobaric ordance is capable of near nuclear yields, but without the messy side effects, like radiation poisoning.
 
IIRC, the general consensus is that Special Relativity (the famed mass-energy equivalence equation E=MC^2) was floating around for a while, several other scientists were working towards it. What was probably quite a few years, even decades, off without Einstein was General Relativity, the unification of Special Relativity with Newton's Gravitational Law.

General Relativity doesn't actually contribute much towards nukes, so the answer would probably be that Special Relativity would be discovered within a decade of OTL (so ~1905-15). So we'd have the theory for it, but whether anyone would persuade politicians to fund a project to build one is another matter.

Quantum Mechanics (Photoelectric Effect) and Astrophysics (General Relativity) will be behind considerably, but that won't affect "important" political events much.

Einstein was the one who ended the debate that atoms existed when he explained Brownian motion. He contributed greatly to Quantum Mechanics, and much much more than just the Photoelectric Effect, which is certainly very important to breaking open the atom.

Nukes would probably be a good decade late at least when compared to OTL, and that's assuming it gets as much money thrown at it as in OTL.
 
Where did you hear that?

The thought that occured to me was this might be a POD for the earlier development of thermobaric weapons. As I understand it, sufficiently large thermobaric ordance is capable of near nuclear yields, but without the messy side effects, like radiation poisoning.

A BBC special on the crusades, I believe. It was British atleast.
 
Einstein was the one who ended the debate that atoms existed when he explained Brownian motion. He contributed greatly to Quantum Mechanics, and much much more than just the Photoelectric Effect, which is certainly very important to breaking open the atom.

Nukes would probably be a good decade late at least when compared to OTL, and that's assuming it gets as much money thrown at it as in OTL.
Yes, when I wrote that post I forgot about Brownian Motion. You're right that it should probably be delayed more than I said. I wrote about Brownian Motion in later posts, so I apologise for the error. :)
 
Nukes would probably be a good decade late at least when compared to OTL, and that's assuming it gets as much money thrown at it as in OTL.

We might have to consider when and where the atomic explosion era might begin. At the same time, other scientists were researching nuclear phenomena: Curie and Becquerel received the Nobel Prize in 1909 for the discovery of radioactivity, radium and polonium. Had Einstein not introduced relativity in 1905, radiation would be less understood.

Now, suppose the quest for radioactive materials proceeded at an accelerated pace. Soon, it would be discovered that these materials produced heat as well as light. An industrial pursuit might begin, with physics trailing in the back seat.

So then what? The first atomic explosions might be in Chicago or Paris, not White Sands and Hiroshima.
 
It wouldn’t have mattered if Einstein hadn’t discovered E=mc2. We’d still have had the A-bomb and other developments in quantum theory. And roughly in the same time too.

Otto Frisch and Lise Meitner used MEE to understand the quantitative energetics of the experiment carried out by Otto Hahn which showed that collision of a neutron with a Uranium nucleaus produced the element Barium as one of its by-products. So, yes, MEE played a pivotal role which this relationship played in making the fundamental leap to the initial hypothesis that large atoms could split into approximately equal halves.

But would there be an MEE without Einstein? Yes.

Einstein derived the formula from previously-understood laws of physics. The derivation involved using the postulates of Special Relativity. In this method, the first step is deriving the Lorenz transformation, i.e., how space and time coordinates transform when the frame of reference is changed.

Early approximations of the transformation were published by Voigt (1887) and Lorentz (1895). They were completed by Larmor (1897, 1900) and Lorentz (1899, 1904) and were brought into their modern form by Poincaré (1905), who gave the transformation the name of Lorentz, and Einstein.

Einstein derived the equation in 1905. Already, Max Planck had hit upon the Planck’s Constant. Even earlier, in 1896, Henri Becquerel had discovered radioactivity, and the next year, J.J. Thompson had proposed the plum-pudding model. In 1907, just two years after Einstein derived the equation, Ernest Rutherford experimentally deduced the existence of a positively-charged nucleus at the center of an atom.

Therefore, the basic principles behind E =mc2 had been around for a long time. Einstein’s genius was putting together the disparate strands developed by Poincaré and others. If Einstein weren't around, Poincaré would have had the best chance of discovering it, maybe not in 1905 itself, but certainly a few years later. Meanwhile experiments would have continued to produce the same results. In the end, it would have evened out, and we’d still have had fission.

Kaushik
 
It is very unlikely bomb would be in time for WWII. Delaying physics just a couple of years insures that. But it must be noted that both special and general relativity are pretty unavioudalbe as they are solutions to the two biggest puzzles in physics of the time and everyone was looking for it whatever it was.
 
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