The development of science and technology was linear.
Once I had iron ore, I learned smelting techniques through certain methods and eventually produced iron goods.
This linear development contained a certain causal relationship. It did not appear out of nowhere.
It would not happen that humans knew neither what iron ore nor iron was, yet had already invented iron-related smelting and forging techniques.
Nor would they have perfected an entire series of creations and inventions related to iron. That would be unreasonable and unscientific.
Therefore, to a certain extent, the development of science and technology was a linear process governed by causality.
The reason the technology tree was called a "tree" was that technological development first needed a root. All subsequent branches were built upon that root and stem. Without basic science, it was impossible to develop by leaping forward.
According to the normal course of scientific development, people should have been at roughly this stage by now. In the late period of the war, the global economy was rapidly recovering, and people were discovering more new things.
People began using the power of money to build all kinds of enormous experimental machines and conduct experiments that would have seemed inconceivable or outrageously wasteful in the past.
Perhaps some scientist suddenly thought, Why the hell don't I try bombarding an atomic nucleus? Of course, before that, he might already have bombarded other things and achieved some results, but not enough to make him obsessed.
So he began bombarding atomic nuclei out of curiosity and discovered their extraordinary nature, as well as the physical reactions produced afterward.
At the moment when enormous energy was released, he might have thought of using it to advance humanity and applying it somewhere that could quickly be turned into profit—in other words, generating electricity.
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