Historians like to play the parlor game called "What If...?".  You start by asking "What if such-and-so hadn't happened the way it did, how would things afterwards have been different?"  You're permitted to ask what if a thing hadn't happened, what if it happened slightly differently, or what if something that didn't happen, but could have, had happened?  Although the game is usually played with known history (such as "In 1914, in Sarajevo, if a certain vehicle carrying the Crown Prince had been delayed, there may not have been a world war") it can also be played with events in pre-history.  For example, "What if an asteroid hadn't decimated the dinosaurs 65 million years ago, would the mammals have remained bit players and intelligent life would never have evolved?"  Some people take away from the experience of these games a sense that Chaos Rules, and the unfolding of events is not "determined."  Others react by acknowledging merely that large-scale events are subject to so many small-scale events beyond any person's ability to have knowledge that it is impractical to predict the future of the real world even though it is determined at a fundamental level.  Yet others set aside the philosophical arguemnts about the nature of reality, and are content to merely gain from the exercises an appreciation of how intricately events interact to produce the Saga that is Mankind.  For all, the game is an amusing exercise.  Here are some examples.

    Atomic Bomb
    Alexander the Great
 
 

On Where the Atomic Bomb Was Developed

The atomic bomb ended World War II decisively, but the bomb might have ended the war just as decisively in the favor of the Axis powers if it had it been developed by German scientists first.  It is commonly thought that Hitler essentially guaranteed his unwitting handicap in the atomic bomb effort by hounding Jews to the point that many of them emigrated from Germany, and many of Germany's smartest scientists were Jews.  Italy also harassed the Jews, forcing some of their best minds to leave.  The list includes Einstein, Fermi (his wife was Jewish), Edward Teller and Hans Bethe - all of whom played a role in the Allies development of the bomb.  However, suppose the feasibility of an atomic bomb had been demonstrated before this wave of emigration, and before the lid of secrecy had been placed on their work for the Allies?  The following is from an article written by Richard Rhodes for Time magazine's "Scientists and Thinkers of the 20th Century" issue, March 29, 1999.

"The Pope [Enrico Fermi] and his team almost found nuclear fission in 1934 in the course of experiments in which, looking for radioactive transformations, they systematically bombarded one element after another with the newly discovered neutron.  They missed by the thickness of the sheet of foil in which they wrapped their uranium sample; the foil blocked the fission fragments that their instruments would otherwise have recorded. It was a blessing in disguise.  If fission had come to light in the mid-1930s, while the democracies still slept, Nazi Germany would have won a long lead toward building an atom bomb."
 

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This site opened:  April 17, 2000.  Last Update: April 17, 2000