How the Axis Lost the War

It was caused by the Seneca Effect

It is impressive how AIs are making possible to do things that once were impossible. I had been searching for data about the territorial progress and decline of the Axis forces over WWII, but the data are scattered and the effort of finding them was too time-consuming for my capabilities. Now, instead, I asked DeepSearch (Grok’s cousin), and it found the data in less than three minutes!

Take the data with some caution: some events seem to be missing, and some interpretations are debatable: for instance, the joint expansion of German and Italian forces in Russia and Greece. The graphic could be tweaked to be closer to the actual events. But it was just a test, done on the run, while I am heavily engaged in other things. The main point is that the graph confirms what I was suspecting: the “Seneca Effect” well describes the cycle of wars. Growth is slow, but ruin is rapid. You can clearly see that happening during WWII.

In other words, WWII was an illustration of the thermodynamic principle of potential energy dissipation. In this case, a military/economic potential. It ended when one of the two sides, the Axis one, had nothing left to dissipate. The potential difference was effectively reduced to zero. Applications to other wars and the current ones are left to the reader's intuition.

I am showing it to you just to give you some idea of how powerful these things have become. To remain in the context of WWII, AIs remind me of something that Adolf Galland, Luftwaffe general and flying ace, said when he flew a jet plane for the first time, “It was as if angels were pushing.” AIs are not angels… oh, well…