I don’t know if this is a Great Debate - more of a What If. Move it to another forum if needed.
Anyway, what would the last hundred years have been like if there had been no Albert Einstein? His work in 1905 changed physics, but was he unique? If he hadn’t been around would Lorentz or somebody else have figured out relativity anyway? Or was Einstein’s work so revolutionary that physicists might still be looking for ether without him?
And without Einstein’s work how different would history be? No atomic bombs and no nuclear reactors probably. What other ways has his work affected common everyday life?
There is a school of thought that says that Einstein’s wife, not Einstein, was the one who did most of the work on relitivity. If this is so (and I’m not saying it is, Im just postulating here) than logically whoever she married would probably get the credit.
Just think about it. If the theory behind multiple universes existing in the same position in spaceis true, then on one world the smartest man in the world would be Carrot Top.
There is a school of thought that says that Einstein’s wife, not Einstein, was the one who did most of the work on relitivity. If this is so (and I’m not saying it is, Im just postulating here) than logically whoever she married would probably get the credit.
Just think about it. If the theory behind multiple universes existing in the same position in spaceis true, then on one world the smartest man in the world would be Carrot Top.
There are people who think she contributed to the work. I don’t think there are too many who blieve she was solely responsible and Albert was just a “front”. And besides, Mileva Marić died nineteen years before Scott Thompson was born.
I often wondered about just that point. How far ahead was Einstein? For instance, flying machines cars and cars you can say Da Vinci was visualizing stuff almost half a millennium away … Jules Verne had a moonshot about a century early. OTHH the Wright brothers may have beat the competition by a decade at the very most …
So any guesses as to how far ahead Einstein was ?
Since that is a highjack let me offer one thought to the OP. Einstein’s celebrity was based on his description of relativity. He used that celebrity in 1938, when Einstein wrote a letter to Franklin Roosevelt suggesting that atomic power could be a major source of energy in the very near future, adding:
“This new phenomenon would also lead to the construction of bombs, and it is conceivable — though much less certain — that extremely powerful bombs of a new type may thus be constructed. A single bomb of this type, carried by boat and exploded in a port, might very well destroy the whole port together with some of the surrounding territory.”
Now often this is described as Einstein “convincing” Roosevelt to begin work on the Manhattan Project. This certainly overstates the case, but Einstein was in the decision cycle at a critical time — I’ll spin this: No relativity and Roosevelt waits until the next year to start the Manhattan Project and the US needs to Invade Japan in Fall 1945. Millions more die than died in the “true” timeline.
Given the outcome of the Michelson-Morley experiment, relativity was probably inevitable. The experiment offered evidence that the speed of light is constant to all observers, and the rest of the theory is just doing the math from that assumption.
I’ve heard from from one my college physics professors, and I think I read this in “The Elegant Universe” also, though I won’t swear it, that there’s a belief that the time was ripe for relativity, and that Einstein just happened to be the first guy to get there (this certainly isn’t to detract him at all though, few doubt that he’s one of the most brilliant of all time.)
Quantum physics on the other hand, is another story, and there Einstein and Planck might have been more ahead of their time, but still at most a decade or so. That’s just my opinion/guess though.
The time was ripe for Special Relativity, the lesser of the two theories of relativity, which Einstein developed in 1905 (the “miracle year”). It was probably also ripe for the explanation of brownian motion and the photoelectric effect, the other two discoveries Einstein made that year. If Einstein had not made those discoveries, then someone else probably would have, within a few years. But it probably would not have been the same person to make all three discoveries, so we wouldn’t have had a single Great Genius with the kind of clout Einstein had, able to grab the attention of the President and the people.
Also, there’s General Relativity, Einstein’s explanation of gravity. While Special Relativity was ripe, GR was not. Most of the mathematics was already available, but nobody had dreamed of applying it to physics, much less gravity in particular. Einstein himself wasn’t particularly familiar with Riemanian geometry when he came up with the key ideas. And experimental confirmation wouldn’t come for many years: The starlight deflection data from the 1919 eclipse wasn’t actually definitive, and the only reason anyone was even looking for it was because of Einstein’s work. The only piece of evidence available before Einstein published was the anomolous perihelion precession of Mercury, and that could be explained Newtonianly by the presence of an extra planet, or a stong solar quadrupole moment. That’s an awfully thin strand to hang a theory from. At a rough guess, were it not for Einstein, it’d have been 50 or 100 years before anyone else came up with General Relativity.
I wouldn’t put too much weight on quantum mechanics, though. While Einstein was one of the founders of QM, there were many others. Schödinger and Heisenberg easily had more to do with the development of QM than did Einstein, and one might say the same about Planck and Dirac. The work might have started a little later, waiting for someone else to do the photoelectric effect experiment, and it might have proceeded a little slower, for having one less mind working on it, but it would still have been done.
The widely held view amongst physicists is that special relativity (SR) would have been found anyway, but that general relativity (GR) would probably not have been invented for a few more decades after 1915 without Einstein. While I suspect this is more of a Received Idea than a considered opinion for most (and that’s not a slam Chronos), I also suspect it’s not too far wrong.
As a preliminary, I should explain that I’m usually influenced in such counterfactual questions in the history of science by the suggestion that style is just as important as timing. How one presents one’s new ideas is as crucial to their influence as when you do. The same idea expressed differently shapes how others pick it up. It’s very common for notions to be “in the air”, waiting to be grasped and published. In most such cases, researchers grope towards the “best” way of thinking about the issue, each sort of getting the key point and each being able to push the matter forward. Over time, and often decades after the initial discoveries, this gets tidied up into a nice textbook explanation. In a few cases, one of the early contributions “crystallises” the issue in the fumbling stage, producing an incisive presentation then. Such contributions get the timing right, but are also unusually influential.
(This is a common enough idea, though I should especially mention the way Gunther Stent has used it in assessing the significance of Crick and Watson’s paper on the structure of DNA.)
It’s obviously natural to start with the 1905 contributions.
[ul]The stuff on the reality of atoms and Brownian motion. The technical arguments about the sizes of atoms would have been resolved soon enough and the philosophical ones were fading anyway. Einstein’s contributions stand out amongst what was being done in the period, but there was other brilliant work being done. This was science of the highest quality, but within a context of wider progress.[/ul]
[ul]Special relativity. Several, perhaps most, of the elements of what became SR were already in the literature. Though it’s worth remembering that neither Lorentz nor Poincare quite accepted the theory once published, so it’s hardly obvious to extrapolate that they’d have discovered it if Einstein hadn’t. But someone would have sooner rather than later. However, one aspect to consider is that Einstein seems to have been guided mainly by aesthetic considerations in reaching the theory. (It’s slightly unclear whether he was even conciously aware of the Michelson-Morley experiment at the time; the point has been argued back and forth over the years.) Even once he’d proposed SR, it was several decades before the tests of it became clearcut and its widespread acceptance was not directly driven by experiment. It’s at least possible that some form of Lorentzian electrodynamics might have held sway for a period, with people constructively working within that framework. One might even see this staggering on for a decade or few.
That the initial 1905 paper quite so neatly nails the key issues in its first half is a good example of what I was saying above: the conciseness in which it reformulates things is as striking in this instance as that he was the first to grasp all the pieces.[/ul]
[ul]E = mc[sup]2[/sup]. Relations between mass and energy were already being considered in pre-SR electrodynamics and this would have continued regardless. Nor was the exact significant of his 1905 paper on the subject immediately obvious. On top of which, the experimental situation in this area remained extremely messy for quite some time. Even in the actual timeline, accurate tests of the relation really had to wait till the 1930s. I’ll discuss this a bit more below.[/ul]
[ul]Quantum physics. I’d generally argue that the decisive effect of the 1905 paper on the light quantum is really on Bohr in 1913. The events of the 1920s and the advent of quantum mechanics follow from the questions and opportunities raised by that Rutherford-Bohr model of the atom. The other consequencies of that 1905 paper are part of that stew, for sure, but they don’t quite give rise to the sheer amount of attention that atomic physics received in the period. In general, those who create quantum mechanics are exactly those who cut their quantum teeth on the byzantine complexity of spectra post-Bohr in 1915.
So what happens without Einstein in 1905? I’d bet on Bohr doing it anyway. His 1913 papers are a fabulous bit of down-and-dirty phenomenology. He was reacting to experimental data from his own colleagues, a fabulously decisive insight from his boss and theoretical fragments. Only one of the latter was Einstein’s. The far less profound Balmer formula seems to have been far more crucial.
The debates about the reality of light quanta would have taken place on a different timescale, but I don’t see those as a brake on the quantatitive progress through the 1920s.[/ul]
There are then the post-1905 affairs:
[ul]General relativity. I obviously tentatively nod towards Feynman’s Lectures on Gravitation. While hardly remotely rigorous as an historical inquiry, from a physicist’s point of view these are the interesting thought experiment of how quantum field theorists would have cooked up GR given a few decades. We could have got there, at least possibly via a series of messy arguments that eventually stumble upon the elegant geometric argument of 1915 and earlier. One of the nicer aspects of Feynman’s argument is that it does make one wonder what beautiful theories we are currently only groping towards.
More historically, Einstein’s actual steps towards GR were particularly sweet. But, even then, he had significant help from particularly talented mathematicians in the latter stages.[/ul]
[ul]Nuclear physics. Contrary to popular belief, Einstein’s work had only fairly indirect effects on the development of nuclear physics. Aside from the issue of testing E = mc[sup]2[/sup] via the subject and various failed unified field theory speculations that were pretty vague to start with, he really published nothing on the subject whatsoever and quickly fell behind developments. I’d suggest that the only aspect where his ideas made any difference in timing is over the question of sorting out nuclear weights. During the period where the idea of isotopes still had to be agreed upon, the issue of mass deficits complicated the issue. As noted above, it took a good long time for that to be isolated. Without the theory of SR behind it, that debate would have been a bit messier.
But most of the bigger picture of nuclear physics would have developed the same independently.[/ul]
Which brings us on to:
You’re absolutely right that the conventional account of the Einstein letter vastly overstates its significance. But the extreme version of this thought - that the letter had no practical, long-term effect whatsoever - is at least worth toying with.
The first thing to realise is that it’s not entirely clear that Einstein’s celebrity had much to do with the effect of the letter. At best, he was the messenger rather than the authority in the matter. As already mentioned, he had no real knowledge of the state of nuclear physics at the time, so he was merely relaying what Leo Szilard told him. The origins of the letter are messy, but it was Szilard who approached Alexander Sachs via a mutual friend. They discussed raising the issue with Roosevelt. Although Szilard had already discussed action with Einstein, it seems that the crucial intervention of Einstein’s name is that Sachs and Szilard agreed that it might help and hence he signed the letter. Just by himself and his other contacts, Szilard had got at least within one step away from the Oval Office. Sachs raising the issue might have been more than enough for Roosevelt to have paid it the attention he did at this stage (though he did reply to Einstein).
But altogether more significant is that Roosevelt actually did virtually nothing. In his defence, this was partly a result of how Szilard had framed the approach in terms of uranium supplies. Szilard himself was later to say that the US government did nothing significant until the UK raised the Frisch-Pieirls calculation - see his various recollections about their reaction in Leo Szilard: His Version of the Facts (MIT, 1978).
As for the fact that the US did a certain amount in response, that still probably didn’t cut the ultimate delivery times for the 1945 bombs. What’s impressive about the Manhattan Project from an admin perspective once it gets going is not that it was efficient, but that it was effective. Groves et al were prepared to vastly overspend and duplicate effort, if need be. In those circumstances, the limited progress that had already been made was almost completely irrelevant: if that hadn’t been done, they could simply spend more.
Although the suggestion that Mileva significantly contributed to her husband’s work evidently persists at some level within popular culture, it’s been over a decade since specialists in the history involved examined the evidence and found it entirely wanting. She probably was a valuable sounding board for his ideas, amongst others, but that was about it.
I’d even argue that it’s sad that a group of predominately Serbian nationalists have co-opted for their narrow ends the life of someone who was a pioneer in women obtaining entry into European scientific higher education.
As I understand it, some of Einstein’s theories from 1905, especially those on the curvature of space-time, were inaccurate. Thing is, due to technology at the time, the only real way to test his theories from Earth was by detecting light rays during a solar eclipse. A widely available observable one wouldn’t happen for ~15 years during which time Einstein had the ability to go back through his calculations and make adjustments.
Now, let’s say Einstein didn’t exist and person X later came up with the original Einsteinian calculations but didn’t have time to revise them before testing. The viewed results would be quite different from the expected outcome. Not wrong per se, just inaccurate. How much longer would it have taken the scientific community to come to an agreement over person X’s theories? How would that affect scientific advancement? Just food for thought.