What if聟the Nazis had won; Newton had abandoned science; electric motors had pre-dated steam engines; Darwin had not sailed on the Beagle; Charles II had no interest in science and a young Einstein had been ignored?
ACCIDENTS change history, and in the history of science there is surely no greater accident than Max Planck being one of the editors of the German journal Annalen der Physik 100 years ago. Without Planck鈥檚 influence, it is inconceivable that the journal would have published, in the space of a few months, four papers by an unknown amateur scientist 鈥� papers that transformed our understanding of the universe.
The unknown was Albert Einstein, then a 26-year-old patent examiner living in Berne, Switzerland. In 1905 Einstein had something of a purple patch. The first three papers he wrote that year 鈥� on the photoelectric effect, special relativity and Brownian motion 鈥� are now each considered worthy of a Nobel prize in their own right. The fourth laid the groundwork for the famous equation E=mc2.
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Planck had never heard of Einstein, who had no formal scientific training beyond a qualification to teach high-school physics. But he saw something in the papers and, having dispatched an assistant to Berne to check that Einstein really existed, decided that they should be published. Planck鈥檚 support was critical: no other physicist at the time would have accepted the papers, and for years afterwards Planck was widely blamed for allowing such 鈥渦nnecessary鈥� work to see the light of day.
鈥�Einstein a no-go
Would anyone else have come up with special relativity if Einstein had been ignored?鈥�
The attacks started almost straight away. In 1906, for example, an experimental physicist called Walter Kaufmann at G枚ttingen University in Germany published the first experimental test of Einstein鈥檚 paper on special relativity. At the end he wrote: 鈥淚 disprove herein Einstein.鈥�
Planck remained unmoved, and Einstein himself paid no attention. When his friends pointed out that his career was at stake, he confidently asserted that Kaufmann鈥檚 experiment must be flawed. (It was 鈥� his equipment had sprung a leak, something that was only realised later.) Planck and Einstein were, of course, eventually vindicated.
So what would have happened had Einstein鈥檚 papers not been accepted, or Kaufmann鈥檚 attack struck home? When Einstein himself was asked that question later in his life, he replied that he firmly believed another physicist would have come up with the same concepts. He even had an individual in mind: Paul Langevin (1872-1946) of the Coll猫ge de France in Paris, who is probably best remembered for the scandalous affair he had with Marie Curie in 1910. Langevin studied under mathematician Henri Poincar茅, who published an unsuccessful attempt at a theory of relativity in 1905 shortly before Einstein did.
And Einstein had good reason to believe that Langevin had what it took. The two worked together and became close friends; they can be seen standing next to each other in a photograph of the first Solvay conference of eminent scientists in 1911. It鈥檚 curious to think that the Frenchman鈥檚 face, and not the one to his immediate right, could have become one of the icons of science.
We can never know if Langevin really would have come up with special relativity. But arguably no one but Einstein could have come up with general relativity, the 1915 theory that incorporated gravity into special relativity and gave birth to the science we now call cosmology.
And had Einstein not risen to global fame there is another tantalising 鈥渨hat if鈥� to ponder. Einstein鈥檚 1939 letter to President Roosevelt, pointing out that nuclear chain reactions could be used to devastating effect, is often credited with playing a key role in the US winning the race to build the atom bomb.
In truth, it did nothing of the sort. Roosevelt鈥檚 administration did not start thinking seriously about the bomb until 1941, when a paper by two German physicists living in the UK, Rudolf Peierls and Otto Frisch, demonstrated that one might be possible. And in any case Nazi scientists under Werner Heisenberg never managed to make a bomb, nor even a working reactor. Einstein鈥檚 non-intervention would have made no difference.
