
Russia’s Science Community Reboots - t23
https://motherboard.vice.com/en_us/article/putin-trump-russia-science-russian-academy-of-sciences-itmo-university-research
======
CamperBob2
_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.

~~~
olegious
"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](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Laser)

~~~
li4ick
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.

~~~
mkalygin
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...](https://www.britannica.com/biography/Aleksandr-Popov-Russian-
engineer)

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

~~~
CamperBob2
Agreed.
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oleg_Losev](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.

~~~
mkalygin
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.

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

------
woodandsteel
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.

