momentum vs butterfly effect

No no what I'm saying is that if he fell off his horse, then another general could have managed to take charge and later be remembered as Alexander the Great after he managed to destroy most of the evidence concerning the previous general.

That's all. :)
 
No no what I'm saying is that if he fell off his horse, then another general could have managed to take charge and later be remembered as Alexander the Great after he managed to destroy most of the evidence concerning the previous general.

That's all. :)
But that is besides the point. If that general doesn't create the same empire that Alexander did then history's course would have been completely altered, even if he did then probably still would have.
 
No no what I'm saying is that if he fell off his horse, then another general could have managed to take charge and later be remembered as Alexander the Great after he managed to destroy most of the evidence concerning the previous general.

That's all. :)

Yeah, but what are the chances that that general would have the skill/ambition/madness of Alexander?
 
It's worth pointing out here (before things degenerate into an argument about what events were significant etc :rolleyes:) that Events have Multiple Causes.

Some Causes may be large enough that they overshadow others - e.g. sudden death - and we like to take them as our PODs. Others tend to be of equal importance and it becomes obvious to us that there are many Causes that changing one won't significantly alter the outcome - would one less knifethrust have saved Caesar?

And each Cause is an Event itself.
History per se is made of the combination and interaction of Events.
But in telling History we are telling a story (it's the same root word ;)) and we like to highlight the Events in that story that are meaningful to us and to our audience.

The World is indeed a Stage, but each Performance differs ;)
 
I disagree.

Applying your logic to Alexander the Great's Conquest, that would mean that if Alexander fell off his horse and died at the beginning of his invasion of Persia then the Greeks would still conquer the Persian Empire and create their own which would last for a small amount of time before disentigrating in the same way that Alexander's did in OTL.

I can't buy that.
To reverse your argument, would a russian victory in 1905 have averted some form of insurrection later on? Or was the poor performance of the russian military during WWI solely due to poor leadership? The reason for both these failures and the mess that followed could be attributed to the fact that the russian state was lagging decades behind the rest of its rivals in reforms in every concievable aspect
 
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