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Updated Sunday 15 May, 2011 12:18 PM |
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This Day in Alternate History Blog
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Puttin’
on the Ritz
Whether or not this scenario is hard AH or ASB
fodder is debatable; and it is debated by minds more suited to it than mine. To
start with, we need a refresher course in physics.
It’s frequently supposed that Albert Einstein’s
Special and General Theories of Relativity are towering and unique achievements,
and that if he had not lived, his work may not have been duplicated yet. A quick
perusal of the scientific journals of the 19-aughts shows this to be rubbish. No
fewer than four persons (Einstein, Lorentz, Poincare and Ritz) proposed
solutions to the basic problem at hand, the existence or non-existence of
“ether”. Peer review uncovered flaws in Poincare’s mathematics, and his
theory was quickly retired. Ritz died about a year after publishing his
preliminaries; without an active voice defending them in the journals of peer
review, his work was quickly swept under the rug (except for some brilliant
equations involving atomic spectra and quantum energy levels) and the duel was
between Lorentz and Einstein. It was settled in 1919, when Eddington made a
polar expedition to take precise measurements of, among other things, the
position and trajectory of Mercury; Lorentz’s and Einstein’s theories
predicted different values for it. The evidence came in for Einstein, and e=mc^2
became accepted physical law. Twenty-four years later, we saw a mushroom cloud
in New Mexico.
Peer review is all well and good, but one might
consider that mushroom cloud the ultimate argument in Einstein’s favor. The
problem is that Ritz’s equations remain the most detailed and accurate for
calculating electromagnetic phenomena; his verbal explanation may seem out of
whack, but his math was better than Einstein, Planck, Heisenberg, Feynman or
Hawking.
So, given that his math is good, what might he have
accomplished if allowed to defend his work further, eclipsing Einstein? I’m
going to give him another 36 years (he was born in 1878) so that he dies in 1935
(the eve of war, perhaps). The “duel” in physics will thus continue to be
between Ritz and Einstein, the Eddington expedition will be unnecessary or
otherwise occupied, and Einsteinian space-time becomes a subject for esoteric
scholars and cranks as the majority of the physics community sides with Ritz
(the German scientific journals of the day did anyway). I shall assume that the
intellects of the two men operate at comparable speeds, so that Ritz comes up
with some equation to account for diffraction through an atmosphere in 1918 (as
WWI wraps up; I suspect his survival would not have impacted that struggle
materially). At that point, the state of physics could be summed up as follows:
a mechanism for diffraction supposes a means of affecting diffraction, so Ritz
would appear to have found a way to use massive electrostatic charges to
generate raw force—the “tractor” and “pressor” beams of Star Trek
fame. If I read his math correctly, the energy involved is truly massive, but
for the moment that’s secondary. Ritz has a theoretical basis for artificial
gravity and antigravity, but it’s way out there and probably needs refinement
by a later mind (Feynman, Wheeler, and Tetrode all leap to mind).
What he doesn’t have is a very good explanation for
radio, television, the telephone and other wave-based information phenomena.
Ritz doesn’t believe in waves at all (it’s all particles) but radio is
already in its infancy. This is probably what makes people take another look at
Lorentzian electromagnetism in the 1990s and 2000s, but we’ll set it aside for
now and assume a kludgy sort of quantized wave is postulated, and the engineers
run with it.
There are a few interesting stumbling blocks in the
near future for Ritz; the first and greatest is Enrico Fermi. Fermi was more of
a tinker than a deep theorist, and he just might discover nuclear fission
accidentally (he narrowly avoided doing just that in OTL 1934). Neutrons will
still be isolated by Chadwick, Fermi will shoot beryllium and polonium full of
neutrons just to see what happens, and discover nuclear transmutation, nuclear
decay and nuclear fission pretty much in one swoop. He’ll publish. Someone,
somewhere, will realize the possibility of a self-sustaining reaction with the
stuff. But without Einstein’s famous little formula, nobody realizes that this
is the key to absolutely ridiculous amounts of energy. If Fermi remains with the
Italians rather than flees to America (give him a different wife; his wife Laura
was Jewish in OTL), he can even be wrongly labelled a Nazi crackpot. He has sown
the seeds for a re-examination of Einstein, but relatively few people will
correlate his work with articles since “discredited” in German scientific
journals from 20 years ago.
The other two are Louis de Broglie and Wolfgang Pauli.
Pauli will be a childhood convert to Ritz, and the man who first isolates the
fundamental particle of force, which we’ll call (sorry) a forceon. He’ll
clean up Ritz’s particle theories for public consumption. If we were going to
introduce quantum gravity, he’s where it would come from. Without his
exclusion principle, though, the structure of the atom remains in post-Bohr
limbo, and atomic physics is retarded. He may arrive at it anyway—it’s
darned handy for explaining the motion of electromagnetic forces through ferrous
materials—or someone else might. But he’s the man who really retards nuclear
physics thanks to his new priorities. Incidentally, his sojourn in America
during the War was sheer dumb luck; butterflies could put him working for either
side, or dead.
The last problem child I’ll mention is Louis de
Broglie. Broglie reasoned that since matter and energy are interchangeable on
some levels, and energy has waves, then…so does matter. This explained the
existence of quantum electron levels within atoms; once they were bound up as
matter, electrons could only exist at a harmonic of their fundamental frequency
(deliberately distorted and simplified). Since both of his suppositions are
considered untrue by a slight majority of the physics community in TTL, we could
relegate him to the status of basement crank, high-school chemistry teacher or
Vienna patent clerk. That’s not too likely for a brilliant aristocrat, though.
I propose that, instead, he studies the exciting work being done in X-ray
crystallography in those days. Comparing Ritzian theoretical diffraction with
observed X-ray diffraction, he advances the study of the structure of crystals
and makes some minor corrections to Ritz’s theory (Ritz was working with much
lower quantum energy levels, what the crass would call frequencies, so he may
have missed something). He should arrive at something fundamental, I know, but
I’ve having trouble thinking of what. Perhaps he proposes a crystalline,
geometric sort of atomic internal structure that sends scientists on a wild
goose chase for a decade or two.
What do we have at the dawn of WWII, since we don’t
and won’t have the Big Bomb? We have the sweetest anti-aircraft gun
imaginable. A “Ritz Force Cannon” takes too much energy to be mounted on a
tank or a plane, but you can connect one to a city power grid. A parabolic
targeting reflector seems the way to go; with a perfect parabola, you get a
pinpoint weapon that will shear a plane in half effortlessly. Distort the
parabola a bit, and you have a sort of shotgun weapon that virtually can’t
miss its target, but only acts like the aforementioned tractor beam, so the
gunner must steer the plane into a solid unmoving object before he loses power
or lock. Probably not too difficult; strategic bombing of population centers
like London or Dresden has pretty much ceased to be an effective strategy,
unless it’s a very cheap unmanned warhead which can do some damage wherever it
comes down (chemical and biological weapons). Knocking out a cities’ power
supply becomes an important tactical point.
Nearly every country, I suspect, will have access to
Ritz’s work. I suspect the ineffectiveness of air attacks on population
centers will be understood by most major parties to the war at its beginning;
aircraft are used to harass and defend columns of ground forces, but large
bombers probably aren’t developed, as they can’t really improve on the
performance of an artillery battery for the same money. Bomber money might get
redirected to Naval forces, but for simplicities’ sake we’ll say it went
into designing and building those Ritz Cannons. I would gladly let a WWII
tactical maven amplify upon these points, but I note in passing that 1) the
Battle of Britain is likely to pose less of a threat to the British, 2)
Operation Olympic is America’s only viable plan with reference to Japan, 3)
Pearl Harbor may go differently, and the IJN may commit different forces to its
expedition. Indeed, carrier airwings are risky propositions, as a Ritz gunner
just might plow your own fighter back into your ship. 4) the poorer
understanding of electromagnetic forces as waves is very likely to retard the
development of radar.
We depart the field of war now, with a general
observation; if manned strategic bombers are wasted money, ballistic warheads
are not, particularly as the same Ritz Cannons can be used to launch a warhead
fairly cheaply, or at the very least extend its range dramatically. And it’ll
likely do some good wherever it comes down, and if you swarm a target with
rockets, the gunners can’t possibly get them all.
After the War, interest in rocketry is stimulated
because of the relative cheapness of the launch equipment and its marked
effectiveness when compared with bombers. With no nukes there is no immediate
possibility of mass death, or at least a lessened one. The lack of experience
building large, long-range aircraft retards commercial aviation significantly.
The missile-delivered biological weapon, though, is so easy and so nasty that
it’s almost guaranteed someone will try it before the UN outlaws it. Détente
will proceed interestingly without the mushroom cloud looming over everyone’s
head (and to my mind, perhaps less smoothly; the USA, at least, feels it has
less to lose). With no reactor-engines, the duration of ships at sea, especially
submarines, remains at WWII levels indefinitely. And no civilian reactors means
continued reliance on coal and oil; air pollution will be substantially worse,
although that may kick off an earlier environmental movement. OPEC will have a
bigger sword to hold over everyone. Oil will be precious enough that plastic
will be more expensive, and will replace wood and iron more slowly; efficient
motor engines, electric cars, mass transit, and solar power will all be explored
earlier and to a greater degree in the West. But without the nuclear escape
hatch, pollution and production are rather more like a zero-sum game than OTL.
The lowered cost of launch once a large enough Ritz generator is in place means
that space stations are likely to be completed by all major powers sooner than
OTL, and at lower cost.
The Soviets won’t even try to play the
environmentalism game. They have the land and the resources to create an
environmental disaster on a scale OTL has never seen (and OTL former Warsaw Pact
is already horrific to someone from the West). They can, however, build a
centralized power grid much faster and with fewer political obstacles than the
West, and they tend to have gifted mathematicians and physicists (if only
because the intelligent and perceptive stay out of the social and biological
sciences). I suspect that come the 60s, it will be the Soviets who combine
better rocketry with more power to crack the problem of practical antigrav and
loft things into orbit. Sputnik need not be a useless tin can in TTL; but we
cannot go further until we examine precisely how badly radio and its cousins
have been retarded.
Ritz is a bit late. Wireless radio communication is at
the dots-and-dashes, spark-gap stage when Ritz publishes his first critique in
1808, but by the time his hypothetical masterwork is published, the diode and
triode vacuum tubes have revolutionized radio and brought us all voice
transmission (thanks to the military value of such a development during WWI). A
theory which does not involve “waves” of any kind seems on the surface of
things absurd, particularly given Rutherford’s interference and light slit
experiments, taught to most schoolchildren. But physics can labor on under the
most extreme of conditions. Given what has gone before, a revision of Ritz is
clearly needed; but inferior broadcasting engineering will retard (or even
prevent) broadcast television, although commercial radio and cable television
can and will be implemented only slightly behind schedule. Cell phones are
similarly held back. Without the mass medium of television shaping people’s
minds until (perhaps) the 70s or even 80s, I hesitate to speculate about popular
culture. The Internet will not be developed because the strategic need is not
present, although computer networking on the corporate and military level seems
likely enough.
Astronomer Edwin Hubble will discover the redshifting
of galaxies and publish during the 20s, but without Einsteinian spacetime,
there’s no clear explanation for his observations. Clearly galaxies are
departing one another, but it’s accepted wisdom that the size and shape of the
Universe are static and Hubble isn’t convincing enough to overturn this. The
“steady state” theory of cosmology is adopted, adequately explaining all
observed phenomena for some decades to come. The bug in Hubble’s observations
is this: given the non-Einsteinian understanding of spacetime, when his numbers
are crunched the Milky Way Galaxy emerges as the stationary center of the
Universe. Some may recall the geocentric theory of the solar system and attempt
to disprove Hubble, but I suspect this is a huge shot in the arm to religious
scientists and spiritualists.
Let’s now turn to the problem of power consumption.
Western Civilization’s consumption of electricity has never outstripped its
production in meaningful ways in OTL, because just as we run out of oil our
mining technologies improve enough to cost-effectively tap a previously
unavailable oilfield. We have come very close on more than one occasion,
however—most notably the late 70s/early 80s, but before that during the late
60s/early 70s when Venezuela was first tapped. In TTL, however, the lack of
nuclear power means that oil consumption must proceed at a faster and faster
pace, and it will accelerate as the discrepancy between TTL’s power generation
and ours broadens. A substantial amount of reserve power must also be held in
TTL to power the Ritz defense guns in the event of an attack. I suspect that
during the 70s, the price of oil and then electricity will skyrocket as
production hits the wall. After all, every attempt to curb demand for
electricity that I’m aware of in OTL has failed completely. The
power crisis can be circumvented, of course. Solar power and coal can make up
the gap, at the cost of substantially greater air pollution (which was already
higher than OTL). Lifestyles can be modified to rely on less electricity and oil
in the developed nations. All of this will take more time to design and
implement than the public wants to wait, though. Persons in developing nations
will see the lifestyle of the first world plummet, allegedly never to return to
its 1970 level, and realize that they will never experience the same level of
comfort. First world citizens protest having their electricity strictly rationed
when they are not at war (and rationing programs, once implemented, are
incredibly difficult to get rid of). As transoceanic shipping mostly runs on oil
that doesn’t exist anymore, intercontinental trade becomes a rarity and
extreme luxury until a coal-burning fleet can be reconstructed. It’s at this
point that I understand I do not wish to live in the Ritz timeline; multiple
manned space stations notwithstanding, a decade of worldwide discontent,
disruption and likely poverty, just at the time I anticipate Ritzian weapons of
mass destruction (see below) will be developed in a world without the experience
of a clearly articulated MAD doctrine, looks like the advent of another World
War. I do not care to wager about its outcome, its theatre or even its
flashpoint, over sixty years after the PoD, but I suspect it comes now. 1949:
Weak nuclear force and electromagnetism found to combine at high energy levels.
(discovered OTL late 70s; better electromagnetic theory allows it to be
discovered earlier in TTL). 1962:
Sustained electroweak reaction produced in laboratory. 1975:
Test detonation of first Ritz-nuclear weapon (amplifies the “weak nuclear”
force to release beta and alpha radiation as atomic mass collapses. A later
iteration will produce the “gamma bomb”, which nullifies the weak nuclear
force, causing the reaction mass to collapse into neutronium only to explode
outward again as gamma radiation). My money’s on the Soviets, but the
superpowers may acquire them at similar times. A Ritz weapon has very little
“flash” or “blast” but releases at least as much (probably much more)
radiation than an OTL nuke. This is the neutron bomb sought by so many OTL
strategists, without a “nuke” preceding it on the development line. As an
aside, Ritz beams will be miniaturized enough to be used as point-defense guns
on ships about now. The use of manned military aircraft thus suffers another
blow. The shoulder-mounted, single-shot Ritz projector is technically feasible,
but the time and effort to train soldiers in the use of a marginal weapon means
that it will see little battlefield use. The terrorists and guerrillas will love
them, though. If
the pollution, power crisis and hypothetical war fail to topple civilization as
we know it, the 80s will see the use of Ritz’s principles to create highly
effective radiation shielding (a powered field, naturally). Spiffy for keeping
the developed powers on top, of course, but also a huge boon to space
exploration. The possibility of drawing on the early crystallography work to
create crystals which react to forceon bombardment in peculiar ways should be
mentioned as well (I’m thinking first of the ultimate clean room, vacuum and
apparatus sealed within a large crystal. Ritz tractor beams can be used to
manipulate things in the “room”, but nothing actually goes in or out).
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