Science and Technology without WW2

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Deleted member 1487

We've done technology without the world wars, but what about just without WW2?
The scenario would probably be a standard trope: Hitler dies early, let's say in the Munich Putsch in the 1920's, so doesn't raise up the Nazi party and Germany ends up with a right wing authoritarian government, but not one that is explicitly anti-Semitic or intellectual. That way the German Jewish and left wing intelligentsia stays in Germany, continuing their work at German universities. This deprives the British, French, and US universities of their work, while keeping together the intellectual community that produced so many advances and Nobel Prizes in the 1920's-30's.

Politically let's say Versailles is gone by 1938 and Austria united with Germany by 1939-40. Other than that Germany doesn't expand and reintegrates after working out some issues (peacefully) with Poland.

No WW2 then and the USSR doesn't invade Europe.

What happens to science and technology without the war and with such a situation in Europe?
 
A peaceful Mitteleuropa

There's a lot of factors that went into OTL WW2's technological leaps, but by and large, the big ones everyone points to- ballistic missiles, radar, jet engines, nuclear fission were all in development during the 1930's but given a massive increase in R&D funding and staff thrown at them to make them work yesterday.

Playing with your POD of WWI still happening but Mitteleuropa is worked out between Germany and A-H's successor states in economic cooperation or union. They'd have a great talent pool on a lot of scientific fields but it'd take a generation for the economy to scale up to keep them working in Germany.
Between the disruptions of WWI and the reparations payments that trashed the German economy, many left to find a job in the UK or the US regardless of politics in the 1920's.

You'd need a big POD in WWI's course to avoid that and that runs into the major fact of the British Empire being the 1200-lb gorilla of the world economy in 1918. How it encourages or discourages competitors is a major factor in determining how successful Mitteleuropa is at developing and keeping talent.
 

Deleted member 1487

There's a lot of factors that went into OTL WW2's technological leaps, but by and large, the big ones everyone points to- ballistic missiles, radar, jet engines, nuclear fission were all in development during the 1930's but given a massive increase in R&D funding and staff thrown at them to make them work yesterday.
Of course these things would be delayed, but perhaps they might benefit from a more relaxed environment, as science was stunted by the war because it cut off scientists from each other, preventing an exchange of ideas between belligerents that occurs in peacetime.
Also universities were taken away from the research they were usually involved in, pure science, and instead focused on developing weapons rather than theory and peace applications. Nuclear fission is a perfect example; rather than being funded as a bomb, perhaps nuclear power is available much sooner, as the war wouldn't take focus from that development of the principles of atomic research.

Just in Germany for example universities were cut out of research, their students drafted, even scientists were drafted (some 5000 IIRC). Teams were cut off from one another and worked in competition rather than together even on the same project. Research was very poorly handled in Germany in WW2, which badly retarded progress in most areas, except for favored things like rocketry. Also with so many of Germany's best physicists (among others) fled to avoid Hitler (ones that would have stayed even with the economy as it was), disrupting promising research in Germany in 1932-3 and actually setting back overall world progress in atomic research until the US and Britain started their joint bomb project in the 1940s.

So without a generation of students, scholars, and scientists wiped out in Europe and all that money wasted on making weapons and leveling the continent, at least some of it could have been used to continue the process of 'Big Science' that was starting pre-war and pre-Hitler in Germany and Britain, but without the focus on military applications, instead on peace time applications like energy production, space exploration and all that that entails (satellites for every purpose), medicines like penicillin, which IMHO was heavily retarded by the war, and so on.

Playing with your POD of WWI still happening but Mitteleuropa is worked out between Germany and A-H's successor states in economic cooperation or union. They'd have a great talent pool on a lot of scientific fields but it'd take a generation for the economy to scale up to keep them working in Germany.
Between the disruptions of WWI and the reparations payments that trashed the German economy, many left to find a job in the UK or the US regardless of politics in the 1920's.

You'd need a big POD in WWI's course to avoid that and that runs into the major fact of the British Empire being the 1200-lb gorilla of the world economy in 1918. How it encourages or discourages competitors is a major factor in determining how successful Mitteleuropa is at developing and keeping talent.
I appreciate the alternate POD, but I'm more interested in what the effect would be with OTL minus Hitler and WW2, rather than Germany surviving WW1 intact. That is an interesting scenario that I'd also like to explore, but can we discuss that in a separate thread?
 
I guess a lot depends on what you mean by 'without WW2', because Science in a world where the Nazis aren't elected is going to be completely different to one when Chamberlain manages to call Hitler's bluff over Czechoslovakia.
 
One of the big reasons that TV took off in the US after WWII was all the Trained Radar Techs Trained during the War .

And then you had the GI bill for the Retuning Troops were almost 1 million men went back to school after the war .
 

Deleted member 1487

I guess a lot depends on what you mean by 'without WW2', because Science in a world where the Nazis aren't elected is going to be completely different to one when Chamberlain manages to call Hitler's bluff over Czechoslovakia.

The first, the Nazis not rising to power at all, because they don't reach prominence without Hitler (who is dead in this scenario)
 

Andre27

Banned
We've done technology without the world wars, but what about just without WW2?
The scenario would probably be a standard trope: Hitler dies early, let's say in the Munich Putsch in the 1920's, so doesn't raise up the Nazi party and Germany ends up with a right wing authoritarian government, but not one that is explicitly anti-Semitic or intellectual. That way the German Jewish and left wing intelligentsia stays in Germany, continuing their work at German universities. This deprives the British, French, and US universities of their work, while keeping together the intellectual community that produced so many advances and Nobel Prizes in the 1920's-30's.

Politically let's say Versailles is gone by 1938 and Austria united with Germany by 1939-40. Other than that Germany doesn't expand and reintegrates after working out some issues (peacefully) with Poland.

No WW2 then and the USSR doesn't invade Europe.

What happens to science and technology without the war and with such a situation in Europe?

While a war is a catalyst for technological development, in this case it is difficult to say at what pace the technological development would have gone since WW2 was the foundation for many of the post war conflicts.

Without a Nazi takeover in Germany and WW2 as we know it, the likelihood of further Soviet aggression into Europe would have been a likely result.

No further soviet advance into Europe makes for a 2nd large butterfly.

No WW2 and no soviet advance into Europe would result in an earlier cold war, but one significantly different.
The European colonial powers would not have been ravaged by war and the impulse given to various independence movements would have been blunted. Europe and America would have gotten more time to recover from the 1920-1930 economical crisis while the USSR might destabilize due to famine and an easily defined "enemy" such as Nazi Germany.

If i had to make an educated guess i'd say we would be at 1960's level of technology, but with butterflies as enormous as these it is difficult to make an accurate assessment.
 
Now if only Stalin could be persuaded not to try to dominate the continent militarily...

Technology will be more 'patchy' (lots of small developers of stuff all vying for room because there'll likely be no big conflict to focus government requirements) overall, with some fields more advanced than OTL and others less so, and maybe a few will be bypassed entirely.

TV will I think, be more advanced, Baird was after all demonstrating colour tv in 1939, so he may get a market there. Aviation will be a mixed bag, you'll probably see earlier transatlantic service, but mainly via seaplanes, and there won't be such a big push for speed, range and reliability. More reliance on trains at the expense of cars too.
 
Different Methods of Development

In the US at least WWII basically cemented gargatuan government grant funded research from universities that are basically responsible for the creation of the Manhatten Project, Bell Labs, NASA and the subsiquent rise of Silicon Valley from the small town from a quiet suburb in Santa Clara California. Other industries such as Dow Chemical and 3M wouldn't be nearly as large today either not to mention smaller Cold War industries across the US devoted to producing instruments such as potentiometers for rocketry and other equipment before closing shop due to no more contracts or outsourced. Without WWII much technological would still be largely in the hands of business savvy inventors and entrepeneurs rather then large educational institutions. Perhaps it would still move in that direction but at a far more gradual pace.

Also I agree there wouldn't be nearly as large a brain drain from Europe and Japan along with other Asian countries could be marching happily on their way to complete issolationism through decree or simply civil/political strife. I think a surprising nation who's people would pioneer computer science would be Poland since the creation of RPN by Jan Łukasiewicz and considering the many of the people behind the Enigma machine were mathematicians and engineers from there.
 
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We've done technology without the world wars, but what about just without WW2?


No WW2 then and the USSR doesn't invade Europe.

What happens to science and technology without the war and with such a situation in Europe?

Well,the technology development is more slow.
Without WW-II late 40s are less or more back of four or five years..but the real great difference is a world without cold war.
Development of computers,jet planes,new syntetic materials,new comunications,rockets is more,more slow.
I not see a space race in 50s and 60s.
Is probable that in this timeline 2012 is at the same technological level that 1970-1975.
Others great changes are in society and pop culture.
United States are more isolationists,and without GI bills and baby boom,society is a little more conservative.
Colonial Empires are still around in some form.
 

Andre27

Banned
Now if only Stalin could be persuaded not to try to dominate the continent militarily...

I think that without WW2 the USSR would collapse. WW2 gave Stalin the opportunity to identify his opponents so without WW2 it's to be expected that other series of purges would occur.

Combine this with the OTL famine and the communist hold may weaken significantly.
 

Deleted member 1487

Also I agree there wouldn't be nearly as large a brain drain from Europe and Japan along with other Asian countries could be marching happily on their way to complete issolationism through decree or simply civil/political strife. I think a surprising nation who's people would pioneer computer science would be Poland since the creation of RPN by Jan Łukasiewicz and considering the many of the people behind the Enigma machine were mathematicians and engineers from there.

What about Konrad Zuse? He does not require the Nazis to do his work and was the farthest ahead in the field of computing before the war. Not having to deal with being side lined by the war and kept out of computing mainstream by being a German post-WW2 would mean he could conceivably be the Turing of TTL.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Konrad_Zuse
Konrad Zuse (German: [ˈkɔnʁat ˈtsuːzə]; 1910–1995) was a German civil engineer, inventor and computer pioneer. His greatest achievement was the world's first functional program-controlled Turing-complete computer, the Z3, which became operational in May 1941.

Zuse was also noted for the S2 computing machine, considered the first process-controlled computer. He founded one of the earliest computer businesses in 1941, producing the Z4, which became the world's first commercial computer. From 1943[1] to 1945[2] he designed the first high-level programming language, Plankalkül.[3] In 1969, Zuse suggested the concept of a computation-based universe in his book Rechnender Raum (Calculating Space).

Much of his early work was financed by his family and commerce, but after 1939 he was given resources by the Nazi German government.[4] Due to World War II, Zuse's work went largely unnoticed in the United Kingdom and the United States. Possibly his first documented influence on a US company was IBM's option on his patents in 1946.

He enrolled in the Technische Hochschule Berlin-Charlottenburg and explored both engineering and architecture, but found them boring. Zuse then pursued civil engineering, graduating in 1935. For a time, he worked for the Ford Motor Company, using his considerable artistic skills in the design of advertisements.[3] He started work as a design engineer at the Henschel aircraft factory in Berlin-Schönefeld. This required the performance of many routine calculations by hand, which he found mind-numbingly boring, leading him to dream of doing them by machine.

Working in his parents' apartment in 1936, his first attempt, called the Z1, was a floating point binary mechanical calculator with limited programmability, reading instructions from a perforated 35 mm film.[3] In 1937, Zuse submitted two patents that anticipated a von Neumann architecture. He finished the Z1 in 1938.

Zuse completed his work entirely independently of other leading computer scientists and mathematicians of his day. Between 1936 and 1945, he was in near-total intellectual isolation.[5] In 1939, Zuse was called to military service, where he was given the resources to ultimately build the Z2.[4] The Z2 was a revised version of the Z1 using telephone relays. In 1941, he started a company, Zuse Apparatebau (Zuse Apparatus Construction), to manufacture his machines.[6]

Improving on the basic Z2 machine, he built the Z3 in 1941. It was a binary 22-bit floating point calculator featuring programmability with loops but without conditional jumps, with memory and a calculation unit based on telephone relays. The telephone relays used in his machines were largely collected from discarded stock. Despite the absence of conditional jumps, the Z3 was a Turing complete computer (ignoring the fact that no physical computer can be truly Turing complete because of limited storage size). However, Turing-completeness was never considered by Zuse (who had practical applications in mind) and only demonstrated in 1998 (see History of computing hardware).

The Z3, the first fully operational electromechanical computer, was partially financed by German government-supported DVL (Deutsche Versuchsanstalt für Luftfahrt, i.e. German Research Institute for Aviation), which wanted their extensive calculations automated. A request by his co-worker Helmut Schreyer—who had helped Zuse build the Z3 prototype in 1938[7]—for government funding for an electronic successor to the Z3 was denied as "strategically unimportant".

Without the war on the Z4 could have ended up being built sooner perhaps.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Z4_(computer)
The Z4 was very similar to the Z3 in its design but was significantly enhanced in a number of respects. The memory consisted of 32 bit rather than 22 bit floating point words. A special unit called the Planfertigungsteil (program construction unit), which punched the program tapes made programming and correcting programs for the machine much easier by the use of symbolic operations and memory cells. Numbers were entered and output as decimal floating point even though the internal working was in binary. The machine had a large repertoire of instructions including square root, MAX, MIN and sign. Conditional tests included tests for infinity. When delivered to ETH Zurich the machine had a conditional branch facility added and could print on a Mercedes typewriter. There were two program tapes where the second could be used to hold a subroutine (originally six were planned).[3]

In 1944 Zuse was working on the Z4 with around two dozen people, including several women.[4] Some engineers who worked at the telecommunications facility of the OKW also worked for Zuse as a secondary occupation.

Programing language:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plankalkül
Plankalkül (German pronunciation: [ˈplaːnkalkyːl], "Plan Calculus") is a computer language designed for engineering purposes by Konrad Zuse between 1943 and 1945. It was the first high-level non-von Neumann programming language to be designed for a computer. Also, notes survive with scribblings about such a plan calculation dating back to 1941. Plankalkül was not published at that time owing to a combination of factors such as conditions in wartime and postwar Germany and his efforts to commercialise the Z3 computer and its successors.

Not sure what the Poles had going, but to me it looks like Zuse was ahead of them and would have been able to get more done earlier without the war and would have jumped over IBM and any other competitors in peacetime.
 
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Science and Tech Across Europe


I like that. In fact, I can see far more cooperation of inventors and scientific minds across Europe without any dire implications. However, with this comes the question of how one can navigate the legal mine-field of each countries' patent system and courts to come up with such groundbreaking discoveries? Would perhaps the European Coal and Steel Community evolve soon enough into the basis for an able trans-European trade body to facilitate these legalities?
 

Deleted member 1487

I like that. In fact, I can see far more cooperation of inventors and scientific minds across Europe without any dire implications. However, with this comes the question of how one can navigate the legal mine-field of each countries' patent system and courts to come up with such groundbreaking discoveries? Would perhaps the European Coal and Steel Community evolve soon enough into the basis for an able trans-European trade body to facilitate these legalities?

Perhaps they will. Once international trade picks up and creates a need there will be pressure for it, especially as it will help keep the peace.
Also German companies figured out patent law pretty well before WW2, as they had filled tens of thousands of patents all over the world and the Allies took these as reparations both after WW1 and WW2. They had all of the patents filled in the US, Britain, and France. In fact the worry was that patents had been filed on German nerve gases prior to WW2, so they feared that idea had been compromised.
 
I think Frank Whittle would have gotten a jet into the air by the end of 1949. Once the British people see it, their obsession with speed will take over, and Jet Racing / Record Breaking will become a public obsession like it did OTL. Mr Ohain and the German Aviation industry will certainly have words to say over this, and the two nations will probably compete in (relatively) friendly one upmanship, like they do in football today. America will probably lag behind without a massive injection of British or German technology.

The BBC will develop its services and technology probably faster than OTL, without a war to divert corporate and civilian funds. The coronation will still happen, as will the associated mass adoption of TV sets.

Without the Final Solution, eugenic pseudoscience will probably continue until (and sadly, probably long after) the discovery of DNA. Indeed, proponants of such activities might increase funding into inheritance science, accelerating it. They will almost certainly not like the discovery their money has paid for.

I'm really not sure what to say about Atomics. In peacetime many nations would blanch at the cost of anything like the Manhattan Project. I can see a lot of very poorly made gen-one nuclear power plants before the first bomb is exploded, and possible more than one cherbol style disaster before people finally cotton on that this is a different and fundimentally more dangerous source of power.
 

Andre27

Banned
I like that. In fact, I can see far more cooperation of inventors and scientific minds across Europe without any dire implications. However, with this comes the question of how one can navigate the legal mine-field of each countries' patent system and courts to come up with such groundbreaking discoveries? Would perhaps the European Coal and Steel Community evolve soon enough into the basis for an able trans-European trade body to facilitate these legalities?

More cooperation? Not likely.
World War 2 may not happen, but WW1 was a recent history and with it national pride and grudges. With WW1 and the economic crisis combined with the political climate in the interbellum WW2 was bound to happen.

More cooperation is not going to happen.
 
I'm really not sure what to say about Atomics. In peacetime many nations would blanch at the cost of anything like the Manhattan Project. I can see a lot of very poorly made gen-one nuclear power plants before the first bomb is exploded, and possible more than one cherbol style disaster before people finally cotton on that this is a different and fundimentally more dangerous source of power.

I think there's more than one way this could go. My guess is that low-power graphite piles using natural uranium would be built in the late 40s or early 50s, all below 1 MWth (ie., these are research tools, not industrial reactors). At some point - probably fairly early on - somebody realizes you can make plutonium that way, and what happens next depends on the international situation. A mini-Manhattan based exclusively around plutonium piles would be very expensive, but significantly cheaper than OTL's Manhattan Project.
 

iddt3

Donor
We've done technology without the world wars, but what about just without WW2?
The scenario would probably be a standard trope: Hitler dies early, let's say in the Munich Putsch in the 1920's, so doesn't raise up the Nazi party and Germany ends up with a right wing authoritarian government, but not one that is explicitly anti-Semitic or intellectual. That way the German Jewish and left wing intelligentsia stays in Germany, continuing their work at German universities. This deprives the British, French, and US universities of their work, while keeping together the intellectual community that produced so many advances and Nobel Prizes in the 1920's-30's.

Politically let's say Versailles is gone by 1938 and Austria united with Germany by 1939-40. Other than that Germany doesn't expand and reintegrates after working out some issues (peacefully) with Poland.

No WW2 then and the USSR doesn't invade Europe.

What happens to science and technology without the war and with such a situation in Europe?
Half of the Intellectuals and Scientists who left Germany left not because they were Jewish, but because they were leftists of some sort. Germany will still experience a Brain Drain if it goes Authoritarian right, just not quite as much of one.
 

Deleted member 1487

I'm really not sure what to say about Atomics. In peacetime many nations would blanch at the cost of anything like the Manhattan Project. I can see a lot of very poorly made gen-one nuclear power plants before the first bomb is exploded, and possible more than one cherbol style disaster before people finally cotton on that this is a different and fundimentally more dangerous source of power.

The Manhattan Project was a rush job in war time. It cost about as much as the German V1 and V2 missile projects, but only cost as much as it did because it was hurried. Spread it out over 10 years (IIRC the brain drain started in 1932-3, so slowed the German research to a crawl by 1936, while the US project didn't start until 1941) without much interruption from 1933 on and by 1943-5 there could well be successful research completed into a bomb or industrial nuclear power.

As to the remark below about German leftists fleeing Germany in an authoritarian right government, I don't think they would, because that was already what Germany had had since 1930 or so. Schleicher was already in government and left wing ideologies were already cracked down on. But still they didn't flee until Hitler came around and started a police state. I'm not saying no one would flee Germany, but I think its less than you suggest.
 
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