Session A16: History of Soviet Physics

“More is Different,” or the “Transition from Quantity to Quality”

Soviet science planners did not recognize the concept of “pure science,” promoting instead the idea that every science worthy of this name should be practically relevant. Their Marxist approach was also consistently non-reductionist, rejecting, for example, eugenicists’ claims to explain social phenomena via biological laws. These general principles also affected the development of new branches within physics, such as physics of metals, condensed matter physics, radiophysics, many-body quantum theory, and non-linear mechanics. This paper will describe some of the pioneering Soviet works in these fields, their position within other subdisciplines of physics, and the new conceptual vocabulary and methods they introduced.   

Dubna: From a secret Research Laboratory to the International Joint Institute for Nuclear Research.

The first research laboratory in Dubna, a village 120 km north of Moscow, was founded in 1949 as the place for the then world’s largest 680 MeV particle accelerator. The institution initially was part of the classified atomic bomb project. Soon afterwards started the construction of another, 10 GeV proton accelerator. In 1956 these secret laboratories were reorganized into an international center for fundamental physics, the Joint Institute for Nuclear Research, an analog for CERN, but with the participation of all socialist countries. The talk will cover the early history of the Dubna laboratories and some of their research accomplishments.   

Secrets in Public: Soviet Physics and Cold War Knowledge Cultures

During the Cold War, Soviet scientists, physicists in particular, were constrained by strict state-imposed regulations on the kind of information they could share with others. The strictures on their behavior were driven by an understanding that physics research, especially in applied fields, had important military applications and thus were more sensitive. These regulations compelled Soviet physicists to adopt a special lexicon that disguised, obscured, or regulated many aspects of their lives: publication of their research, their place of employment, and even their professional identities. Such constraints were not, of course, unique to Soviet physicists but they helped cultivate a kind of rhetorical tension in which Soviet scientists were simultaneously called upon to represent their nation to the world but could not necessarily speak in detail about the nature of the research. Through a number of key examples, this paper looks at knowledge cultures—and the regulation of those cultures—within Soviet science, as part of a broader intervention into the relationship between science and secrecy in the Cold War.   

The Great Experiment: Scientific Cooperation Between the United States and the Former Soviet Union

Post-World War II scientific cooperation between the United States and the Soviet Union marked the first time that governments embarked on large-scale, formal bilateral international science programs as instruments of foreign policy. Over the next seventy years, the forms and goals of these programs with the USSR and its successor states changed in response to new political conditions and relationships. This study traces that history and, through a series of sixty-two interviews, presents the direct experience of scientists, diplomats, managers, and others from both sides as a means to understand the broad outcomes of these efforts. Their testimony also unveils insights into the nature of the Soviet science system and the effectiveness of international scientific cooperation in general.