Philosophy of Science and Alternate History

On Friday, October 30, 2015 at 4:01:39 AM UTC-5, Chrysi Cat wrote: > On 10/29/2015 12:07 PM, jerry kraus wrot > > So, Albert Einstein is the new President of Germany, under Chancellor Erwin Rommel. Ten divisions of American troops are there to keep the peace, but the German military retains many divisions on its eastern border with Stalin's Russia, which corresponds to the old boundary from before the First World War. The Nazi Party has been dissolved. What next? > > > > Why, German President Albert Einstein will negotiate a peace between America and Japan, of course. Japan will agree to withdraw from all of China, retaining only limited imperial control of Korea and Taiwan. Otherwise, they will face the combined might of the entire world, as Stalin's ambassadors make very clear. Emperor Hirohito intervenes directly at this point, broadcasting to the Japanese people that Japan has reached peace, with honor, and will give the Chinese people their freedom. > > > > The Manhattan Project is terminated short of completion, the Atom Bomb is never built, there is no nuclear age, there is no military need for it. The field of physics returns to being a small, arcane discipline. > > > > We have a multipolar world, rather like the current one. As a result, totalitarian governments in Japan, Germany and Russia are forced to adapt to a competitive, capitalist world market. All three are forced to adopt degrees of democratic reforms in order to compete effectively. There is no Cold War. There is no Arms Race. Werner von Braun is no longer of such great interest to America, there is no systematic development of ballistic missiles on the Russian or American side. Without ballistic missiles, there is no need for microcomputer technology for guidance systems, computers remain large, bulky contraptions of very limited application. There is no Space Race, there is no NASA, there is no exploration of outer space. > > > > Science and technology are largely limited to medical advancements, for which people always have a demand. > > > And if you want a more-serious look at this, you're absolutely freaking > LOONY if you think for one second that you've eliminated atomic research > by ending WWII prematurely. No more loony than thinking we'd have have spent 70 years and perhaps 100 billion dollars with no progress whatsoever on research in controlled nuclear fusion, Cat. That is, in terms of making it a commercially viable technology. That's very freaky stuff, don't you think, Cat? Don't underestimate the extent to which technological development can be detoured, suppressed and manipulated by business and government. Or, the extent to which changed cirucmstances will change the course of scientific advances, or eliminate them completely. Don't assume the scientific progress is inevitable, it isn't. We've actually been getting very little of it lately, despite the hype from the scientific community, the medical establishment and big business to the contrary. Thus the global warming silliness, thus, the endless versions of Microsoft Office, and Windows, each scarcely different from the last, thus the slowing rate of increases in human life expectancy, in the last few generations. - hide quoted text - > > Here's a guaranteed outcome for you. YOU HAVEN'T ERASED THE ORIGINAL > EINSTEIN-SZILARD MEMORANDUM FROM EXISTENCE. All these countries _know_ > that there's the theoretical ability to create the new most devastating > explosive know to humanity from fissionable elements. _If_ the US is > stupid enough to mothball or even fully cancel MANHATTAN, all the > research already done (and smuggled to the USSR within months, > rememberr!) is plenty for the Soviet scientists to pick up a lead and > have the ONLY atomic weapons by 1963 at the latest. > > And THEY aren't likely to wait very long to conquer the rest of the > world for the Third International if they're the only ones with atomic > weaponry. Certainly, they won't _announce to their new enemy that they > have this weapon_ and not USE it on them, the way the US did with the > OTL Soviets, because unlike the US, the Soviet Union isn't honeycombed > with Fellow Travellers at the highest level of government who don't > think of their deadliest enemy AS their deadliest enemy. The world is > Red by the time the US would otherwise have celebrated her bicentennial. > > Now, remember, that's still a _worst-case scenario_ (well, unless YOU, > YOURSELF, happen to be a modern-day Stalinist), because it would _never > have happened._ Whether at obviously-temporary peace with the Soviets or > not, the US would not have cancelled MANHATTAN, they just would have had > to work harder to keep it a black project even in 'peacetime'. > > And if they _had_ cancelled it, the _UK_ would have done whatever was > necessary to ensure the completion of an atomic bomb, because _she_ > would likely not even trust _Gaullist France_ or this > apparently-disarmed Germany not to build it first and take a dangerous > and very-difficult-to-overcome-without-the-stupidity-shown-by-the-1945- > through-1949-US lead in military technology. If _this_ happens, then the > issue that the UK is almost effective at keeping the Sovs from turning > their people as the Third Reich was at keeping _theirs_ unturned _by_ > the UK comes into play, and we still get the Soviets building their > first atomic bombs, now by the mid-50s and likely _behind the Brits,_ > but _still the first to announce_ (as the Brits would not announce > without a wartime target, whereas the West is _considered_ full of valid > wartime targets, even without an official declaration of war, by the > Reds). Likely scenarios: the West _gets_ the A-Bomb first, but not > knowing how easy it is for the Reds to steal all their hard work and > 'monkey-see-monkey-do' it in another 3 years, they do nothing to > neutralise the Soviets until the Soviets do a nuclear first-strike on > the West thinking it will force their governments to turn Red. Depending > upon the amount of weapons possessed by each side, either MAD deterrence > ensues as per OTL, or the Soviets get nuked back to the stone age, with > the loss of one Western capitol, likely Berlin or Tokyo. Nobody really knew this would work, and nobody would have spent the kind of money required to get it to work, unless they had an enormously good reason to do so -- in the case of the U.S., fear of the Nazis getting one, and fear of the costs of an invasion of Japan. With the Nazis dissolved, and with peace with Japan, they had no reason to invest the resources required. Not only that, why let the genie out of the bottle? Obviously, everyone would want them, once anyone had them. The Russians would be busy trying to survive in a competitive world, as they are now. Much as Russia can't afford to use its nukes now, for fear of retaliation, Stalin wouldn't have wanted to develop them, because of the cost, because of uncertainty as to outcome, and because everyone else would then develop this ultimate threat to "Mother Russia", as well. Same would apply to the British. > > Even if you somehow HAD erased Einstein-Szilard, PEOPLE STILL WANT > ROCKETRY FOR EXPLORATORY PURPOSES, and the added potential benefit of > guided missiles is still there even without the knowledge that the atom > can be split for military purposes, too. Remember, you're _also_ > POST-INTRODUCTION-OF-V-WEAPONS in July 1944. And for the purposes of > _better guidance of conventional ballistic and cruise missiles,_ someone > will _still_ discover the transistor and eventually the integrated > circuit. For that timeline's sake, I _pray_ it's not a Red who figures > it out. > > Find some other 'tech freezes before we need the transistor, let alone > the integrated circuit' wank and come back to us, if you really insist > on being embarrassed like this in what are increasingly seeming like > attempts to _put the microtechnology genie back in the bottle in _this_ > timeline! But this time you just failed AGAIN, Jerry! Given the multipolar world I'm proposing, there would be no time, money or purpose in developing superweapons of any type, just like now. Everyone would be too busy competing for short term profits to survive, just like now. In economic terms "destructive competition". Which is why Capitalism doesn't lead to scientific or technological progress in periods in which all sides are struggling to survive while competing for limited resources. There are two specific causes of rapid technological advance: 1. Total War 2. Vast surpluses of resources We had "1" durind the World Wars, we had "2" for the two great imperial superpowers following WW2, Russia and the United States. We have neither now, and we have neither in the alternate history senario I propose in this particular thread. QED, Cat.

German President Albert Einstein

So, Albert Einstein is the new President of Germany, under Chancellor Erwin Rommel. Ten divisions of American troops are there to keep the peace, but the German military retains many divisions on its eastern border with Stalin's Russia, which corresponds to the old boundary from before the First World War. The Nazi Party has been dissolved. What next? Why, German President Albert Einstein will negotiate a peace between America and Japan, of course. Japan will agree to withdraw from all of China, retaining only limited imperial control of Korea and Taiwan. Otherwise, they will face the combined might of the entire world, as Stalin's ambassadors make very clear. Emperor Hirohito intervenes directly at this point, broadcasting to the Japanese people that Japan has reached peace, with honor, and will give the Chinese people their freedom. The Manhattan Project is terminated short of completion, the Atom Bomb is never built, there is no nuclear age, there is no military need for it. The field of physics returns to being a small, arcane discipline. We have a multipolar world, rather like the current one. As a result, totalitarian governments in Japan, Germany and Russia are forced to adapt to a competitive, capitalist world market. All three are forced to adopt degrees of democratic reforms in order to compete effectively. There is no Cold War. There is no Arms Race. Werner von Braun is no longer of such great interest to America, there is no systematic development of ballistic missiles on the Russian or American side. Without ballistic missiles, there is no need for microcomputer technology for guidance systems, computers remain large, bulky contraptions of very limited application. There is no Space Race, there is no NASA, there is no exploration of outer space. Science and technology are largely limited to medical advancements, for which people always have a demand.

Slavery and Marriage

Les, in many ways what you're describing is simply the more traditional concept of slavery that existed in Europe prior to the advent of modern Capitalism, around the time of the Christian Reformation. There were slaves, serfs and free men, and considerable social transfer and mobility between the three. Slaves weren't, traditionally, considered to be subhuman, but, rather, simply people who had been unlucky enough to come under the power of others, by law, war or custom. In traditional societies, a slave could marry a free man, simply by the free man buying the slave's freedom. However, the traditional slave system had died out with modern Capitalism, largely because of its profound inefficiency. Simply put, free men work harder than slaves, because it's in their interests to work harder than slaves. This point is emphatically and repeatedly stated in that Bible of Capitalism, Adam Smith's "The Wealth of Nations". The modern incarnation of slavery in the "Old South" was, actually, something of an aberration produced specifically by the invention of the Cotton Gin. The Cotton Gin allowed for machine processing of raw cotton, highly efficiently. However, Cotton still had to be picked by hand. The Cotton Gin artificially shifted the traditional Capitalist playing field for this one product, Cotton, specifically. For Cotton alone, Slave labor was profitable, because the inefficiencies of slave labor were compensated for by the extreme efficiency of the Cotton Gin in processing raw cotton. Even with slave labor, the Cotton Gin made cotton cloth very cheap to produce. Thus, the dehumanization of the Negro Slave was a highly artificial product of circumstances relating to the economics of producing Cotton. I suspect, if marriage between blacks and whites had been tolerated in the "Old South", it would have been very difficult to maintain this fictional dehumanization. And, without it, I suspect it would have been impossible to justify slavery. Some sort of system for free labor picking cotton for profit would have been devised, as the British did in India, for example. And, consequently, there would have been no American Civil War. So, the simple institution of marriage -- effectively a contract between partners determining many aspects of the distribution of wealth and power -- can profoundly affect human history.