A spin-off from this thread.
What would be the net effect, good and/or bad, of going back in time and preventing the birth of Albert Einstein?
A lot of Swiss patents would have not been properly filed.
How long would the development of the atomic bomb have been delayed?
When I saw the title, I thought this thread would be about the great physicist’s faeces.
I am glad to find out that I am wrong. For the moment.
Was there anyone else working along the same lines around that time? If the same discoveries had been made after WWII would there be as much emphasis on atomic energy as a weapon?
Schrödinger and Heisenberg were contemporaries, and although my history of physics is seriously lacking, I believe Schrödinger and Einstein corresponded in the '20s.
Not so sure about Heisenberg (he may have been busy perfecting his meth recipe).
Poincaré and Lorentz essentially had the key parts of relativity in their hands before Einstein, but didn’t quite fit it together, as the story goes, because of their unwillingness/inability to let go of the luminiferous ether – however, using Lorentz’ ether notion, you can essentially derive a theory equivalent to SR, so I think they’d have had a shot at least. As for GR, David Hilbert published the field equations nearly simultaneously with Einstein (I’ve both heard that he did so a few days before, and a few days after, and can’t check easily which one is correct right now because wiki seems to be down). However, he was building heavily on Einstein’s prior work, so I’m less certain about that.
So the ideas, as is often the case, were certainly ‘in the air’ at the time; however, without Einstein, it might have taken a while longer to work them out thoroughly.
Besides the science directly, as I understand, Einstein’s letter to FDR about the threat of a German nuclear weapon was one of the important factors in encouraging him to start the Manhattan Project. Is it possible that research into the bomb might have been delayed or maybe put off entirely? If it was delayed, how might the Pacific war have ended if the bomb came later? What if the bomb wasn’t developed until after the war? How might that have played out in terms of the US’s position as a global power and the cold war? I could quite see even a few weeks or months delay in the bomb could have had some significant and long lasting effects.
Except weren’t Poincare and Lorentz both pretty much done when Einstein published? One was dead, I’m pretty sure, and the other was old, and they were using a concept of ‘local time’ to get around the fact that time changes for entities dependent on their velocity. So it wouldn’t have been those two guys.
Someone would have come up with it - both special and general relativity, as well as the oft-overlooked realization of Einstein’s that light is properly modeled as discrete tiny packets of quanta (rather than infinitely dividable energy), but it could have taken a while.
My guess, based on a shrug, is 10-15 years later.
Whould there have as much emphasis on nuclear energy as a weapon instead of a tool had there been that much of a delay? Is it possible that the development of an atomic bomb might have been delayed even farther?
I’m a relativity dilettante. I’m trying, here, but asking me to make a WAG posited on the given of another WAG is really really stretching.
I don’t know of any reason Bohr’s model of the atom wouldn’t have come about when it did without Einstein. Nuclear decay would have been known, too.
I know it was a huge deal in the 30’s that splitting an atom confirmed Einstein’s E=MC[sup]2[/sup] - some mass was actually lost with the release of a (relatively) large amount of energy. (Ironically, it was in Germany, and I’m pretty sure it was this German Jewish female physicist, so it was dismissed by Hitler’s government).
Would nuclear research have gone on just as quickly without Einstein? I think so, but it may be because of my ignorance.
*edit - she was born Jewish, but converted, and succeeded in nuclear fission after escaping from Germany.
During his “Miracle Year” Einstein made two important discoveries other than Relativity. His paper on Brownian Motion is often considered the first proof that atoms existed and convinced physicists as renowned as Ernst Mach who, as recently as 1905, still thought that atoms were fictional. The discovery of the photon, for which Einstein won his Nobel Prize, was a key initial advance in quantum theory. I won’t speculate on how long these discoveries, along with special relativity, would have been delayed without Einstein, but these discoveries certainly shouldn’t be ignored.
The General Theory of Relativity is, AFAIK, almost irrelevant to any present-day technology, but is often considered Einstein’s most creative work.
“Building entirely” on Einstein’s work would be more accurate. Hilbert worked on the GR field equations only after inviting and attending a lecture on the topic by Einstein, who had developed the intuition, but did not yet have a correct mathematical formulation. There was never any dispute about whose theory it was, just about who first published the field equations.
In 1905, Einstein’s annus mirabilis, both were alive, and neither was terribly old – in fact, they were roughly the same age: Lorentz turned 52 that year, and Poincaré was a year younger (though actually the first of the two to die, in 1912). Lorentz went on to contribute much research to Einstein’s general relativity. (But I’m not confident in claiming that either might have come up with SR in its full form; however, the wiki article about the SR priority dispute makes for interesting reading at least.)
Well, that hypothesis was actually Planck’s, who, however, introduced it in a rather ad hoc way and considered it more of a mathematical contrivance to make the spectrum of black body radiation come out right; it was Einstein who realized that the idea could be used to explain the photoelectic effect. Which, of course, he received the Nobel prize for, so the importance of his contribution there is well recognized.
Yes and no. Einstein didn’t actually write the letter; Szillard, Teller, and Wigner did. They just used his name to make sure the president read it (IIRC correctly, they considered other names before realizing Einstein was the perfect person to do it).
As an aside, when Szillard showed up on Einstein’s porch to first discuss the letter, Einstein was talking with my grandfather. So, without Einstein, one of my family’s two big brushes with history would never have happened.
That last statement is utter nonsense. I have heard (in a lecture by Clifford Will) that the GPS would drift by about 10 miles per day if they hadn’t taken general relativity into account. If you consider the GPS irrelevant, I guess that claim is true. The only thing that would happen is that planes would hit mountains and crash on landing. Oh well, I guess they wouldn’t navigate by GPS–too unreliable.
Radioactivity had already been discovered. I assume Rutherford’s experiments would have gone on as before and so Rutherford’s atoms would have been discovered. And nuclear fission would probably have been discovered anyway. It was not necessary to associate the energy with the indetectable loss of mass. I also think that special relativity was on the verge of discovery in any case.
As for general relativity, according to historian I heard (who presumably looked up the publication dates) Hilbert really did publish a few days before Einstein, but they had been in close contact over it for a while.
Interesting thread Czarcasm. I would dearly love to be able to think like Einstein but sadly I will have to remain just a member of the community.
I imagine the story of the discovery of the cosmic microwave background would have gone very differently if there were no general relativity or Big Bang theory by 1964. How would they have interpreted that radio noise?
10 miles a day!? I’ve never heard that claim. It would get worse over the life of satellites, of course, but that just strikes me as huge. Are you sure you’re remembering correctly?
Anyway, to pick a nit, most of the drift error is due to special relativity, not general relativity (that is, most of the error comes from the fact that the satellites have experienced less time than we have on earth since they launched). So, if we could live with the tiny bit of error that comes from us living in a constant gravity field, septimus’ post is not, AFAIK, utter nonsense as long as s/he’s talking specifically about *general *relativity (which is what s/he said).