Russia’s Science Community Reboots | Hacker News Reader

Russia’s Science Community Reboots

motherboard.vice.com

24 pointst2311 comments

Despite the significant historic impact of many Russian scientific contributions—the laser...

Fellow by the name of Ted Maiman at Bell Labs might beg to differ.

Scientists make contributions and they work supported by the previous contributions. So the argument "X were the first" doesn't have to do anything to science, but only to populism in politics.

"Meanwhile, in the Soviet Union, Nikolay Basov and Aleksandr Prokhorov were independently working on the quantum oscillator and solved the problem of continuous-output systems by using more than two energy levels. These gain media could release stimulated emissions between an excited state and a lower excited state, not the ground state, facilitating the maintenance of a population inversion. In 1955, Prokhorov and Basov suggested optical pumping of a multi-level system as a method for obtaining the population inversion, later a main method of laser pumping."

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Laser

The problem with the Soviet education is the assignment of credit to the inventors. They used to teach that the phone, TV, radio were all invented in USSR. People didn't know any better.

I'm the one with the "wrong education" and don't know "any better". Though I was born in Russia, not USSR. I don't want to argue with you, just let you know that radio was indeed invented independently by both Popov and Marconi. Please read this well written Popov's bio in Britannica [1]. Also the timeline in Wikipedia is good enough to understand how many people are involved in radio invention [2]. The fact that Russian science was slightly isolated from the rest of the world in this particular case, and the patent wasn't awarded by Popov, doesn't mean he didn't invent and demonstrate the radio signal first. And there is no clear evidence that he didn't.

In other words, if most of the US films get the Oscar awards doesn't mean they are the best films out there. If scientists get Nobel prize doesn't mean they are the only greatest. All the awards and prizes are biased.

I really like to see how people ignore something because they got "proper education". That's so debatable. The world is not only US and Europe. There are some other countries and cultures exist too. :-)

[1] https://www.britannica.com/biography/Aleksandr-Popov-Russian...

[2] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timeline_of_radio

Agreed. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oleg_Losev is another good example of how circumstances ranging from war to domestic politics have seemingly conspired to keep Russian scientists from earning the reputation they've historically deserved.

The death of Losev by starvation at the siege of Leningrad arguably set semiconductor technology back by a decade or more. Unlike Marconi, Tesla, DeForest, and other prominent poster children of the wireless era, Losev wasn't engaged in a foot race to the patent office with numerous other well-funded competitors. He could have made some incredibly valuable and unique contributions if his work had been better known and supported.

Laser technology, on the other hand, was only "suggested" by the Soviet researchers, not actually implemented. A lot of different people were "suggesting" a lot of different things back then. Charles Townes's biography ("How the Laser Happened") is very much worth reading for anyone who's interested in this stuff.

Good to know, thank you. The worst thing in modern world, which is known to be in Information Age, is disinformation and speculation using "facts"... There is no the ultimate truth, only different sides of the same coin.

I think that worse than that is basing your conclusions on emotions. Especially because emotions can be triggered by certain specific trained code words.

The US is the same way. A significant fraction of US population thinks everything was invented here, and the US single handedly won WW2.

Agree. That's what I say. Every country lives in a bubble. But let's not demonize any particular country. It's just unfair. Every country has its best minds which try to make this world a better place. Let's try to give as much credits as we can to these great people.

It's really sad what has happened with Russian science and technology under Putin.

One very important factor the article failed to mention is the corrupt, crony capitalist economic system that Putin has cultivated. Big companies are protected by the regime in exchange for pay-offs and political support. That means they don't have to innovate to compete domestically or internationally.

There are some exceptions, but on the whole the amount of tech invention coming out of Russia today is not one-tenth what you would expect out of such a large industrialized nation.

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