Post 2: Soviet Science

To begin with, this is the information from the book I cited in my previous post:

Powers, Thomas. Intelligence Wars: American Secret History from Hitler to Al-Qaeda. New York: New York Review of Books, 2004.

I think the most important thing that I took away from Monday’s reading and discussion is that the Soviets supported science in so far as science furthered progress. Industrialization was a Soviet goal, and industry develops as science finds new, faster ways to accomplish tasks. This fixation on progress, oddly enough, was a hindrance to scientific progress. Scientists had to explain everything they were doing in terms of how it could be applied. The trouble is that science doesn’t work that way; usually many little things discovered in separate projects come together to provide useful information about the world, or a cool new gadget. Josephson explains that the Bolshevik government was pressuring scientists to operate this way, blind to the fact that this pressure may actually slow progress (46). By forcing the scientists to do projects that could supposedly be applied in the near future deterred them from projects that had less immediate application, but potentially vast scientific importance.

Though scientists were valued in the USSR for their contributions to progress, they were also distrusted. Scientists are, by their nature, set apart from us mortals—not just anybody can be a scientist. Take me for example: I could never be a physicist. Ever. Science is a refined skill that requires training and education. Soviets were not interested in such divisions. Scholars were referred to as ‘bourgeois specialists.’ They were a group of people that might not be overly supportive of the current regime, or support the proletariat, but they had skills that were invaluable to the state. Thus they were grudgingly accepted as a necessary evil.

A further division between scholars and laypeople came when Lenin recognized that scientists were floundering, and needed support. M. N. Prokovskii was appointed to the task of improving scholars’ situations. Scholars were given rations so that they would not have to do any work other than science, and they were given money to support their research (Josephson 49-50). This seemingly preferential treatment did not sit well, and contributed to the fear of these ‘bourgeois specialists.’ Even with this support, though, scholars often struggled to get by.

Despite all these set backs, Soviet science did progress, and quickly. They went from being one of the world’s most backward countries, to a being a superpower. Some of this was because they actually funded projects in a better way than the US did (by project as opposed to by individual). I think it was also in part because they didn’t want to lose their jobs, so they worked like crazy to produce results. Another component may have been Soviet espionage (I’m taking a class on the CIA, so I see spies everywhere). The Soviets had infiltrated many groups within the United States, including the scientists working on the atomic bomb. It is a known fact that Americans sold information on the atomic bomb to the USSR. Ethel and Julius Rosenberg were put to death for it (Powers 86). I think that information stolen from US scientists may have been a catalyst for the explosive growth of Soviet science.

Post 1: Beginning Stuff

I liked the discussion on natural philosophy, because it was interesting to see that you can determine some laws of physics purely through argument. Logical fallacies abound though, as the Social Theory of Gravity exemplified, and I’d have to say it’s probably better that we shoot for a more empirical understanding of the world. Then again, there are many things that are beyond the scope of our observational capacity. There’s no perfect answer.

We were all looking for harder answers in class, but when it comes down to it, the reason that ties were severed in the WWI era was because scientists are people too. They are not above the emotional reactions to war. I think we tend to put science, and therefore scientists, on a pedestal where they publish theories that no one understands. In reality though, they are regular folks that come home from the labs every night and listen to the news on their old timey radios and are upset by what they hear. The fact that there was a schism is not hard to understand.

Woodrow Wilson said that the American quarrel was with the German leaders, not the German people. When we discussed it in class, people were saying that Wilson was probably trying to avoid alienating the German people. I think that in addition to that we ought to consider America’s self-perception. In the pre-WWI period, we were only an emerging power, and there was not the same attitude about our dominance that there was by the post-WWII period. At the time that Wilson was saying this, America was considered to be an innocent on the world scene (Powers 3). Perhaps this supposed purity of the American spirit played into Wilson’s comment; he simply thought Americans were above such pettiness.

I think it is interesting that a scientist and an internationalist like Einstein was a Zionist. It seems that a person who advocated a free flow of scientific knowledge, and a pacifist would not stand for the division of people in any capacity. It’s an interesting contradiction.