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Atom bomb saved physics?



The school year started but I am still adding "reflections"
to my Alaska Notes essay at:

<http://alpha.montclair.edu/~kowalskiL/magadan/marek.html>

In the process I found an interesting 1991 book by Yuri Orlov
"Dangerous Thoughts" ISBN 0-688-10471-1. Many of you
probably remember that Orlov, like Sakharov, was the
human right activist in Soviet Union; He is at Cornell now.
This book is his autobiography. It shows how a peasant
boy turned out to be a theoretical physicist and how he got
involved with moral issues. The following paragraphs
may be worth reading. That is why I scanned them.
Ludwik Kowalski
************************************

Not long before Stalin's death a general attack on physics was
being prepared—an assault on quantum mechanics and the
theory of relativity. At a special session of the Academy of
Sciences, scientists were going to be forced to condemn
publicly and without reservation the obscurantist and subjective,
in a word, pseudo-scientific, concepts of Albert Einstein and
Niels Bohr. The philosophers and the most progressive
Communist physicists had already begun the assault. The
Ministry of State Security was rolling up its sleeves.

It was not so difficult to imagine the indignant thoughts of
some righteous, hardworking colonel from the Lubyanka:
"It is time to begin sorting out the actual professional,
political, and moral qualities of these so-called scientists.
They talk about 'unpredictable atomic transitions,' just as
if we're fools and can't understand what's going on. We
will arrange for them a quite predictable transition to here,
the Lubyanka. ...

Budker, with whom I became friends during the last years
of his life and of my freedom, told me how the catastrophe
had been prevented. Igor Vasilyevich Kurchatov, the head
of the nuclear program, warned Stalin that even the slightest
distraction of physicists by a "philosophical discussion"
would wreck the production schedule for nuclear weapons.
The entire nuclear program was based on quantum mechanics
and the theory of relativity. Everything will plunge off the
rails, Iosif Vissarionovich. Stalin grasped this. Leadership
in nuclear and rocket weapons was the primary goal of the
state. These were weapons for future world domination. ...
So he ordered that the physicists, with their pseudoscientific
but, for mysterious reasons, powerful science, were not to
be touched for now. Given the scale of things at the time,
this was a small but remarkable retreat.

And so physics was saved with the help of the atomic bomb.

Alas, it was the bomb, too, that had given us our freedoms
in the Physico-Technical Department and had saved our
professors. Budker described to me how, at the entry
checkpoint of Kurchatov's Institute, where he was
permanently based, the security guard had blocked his
way and said, "Budker? You don't have a passl" Budker
needed no explanation of what this meant and what the
sequel could be. He immediately phoned Kurchatov,
who immediately explained to the proper quarters that
Budker was a participant in the atomic program. Budker's
pass was quickly given back to him.

In the Physico-Technical Department the only one of our
professors to disappear was our super-independent Kapitsa;
but the general retreat of the regime from physics saved him,
too. He was merely dismissed from his Institute of Physical
Problems and from all his other jobs for refusing to work on
nuclear weapons, and set down in his dacha instead of the
Lubyanka. After Stalin's death they apologized to him.

No, we in the Physico-Technical Department hadn't really
smelled gunpowder. We hadn't even had an arrestometer.
I learned about this Leningrad University apparatus from
Berestetsky. In the thirties they had a gallery of professors'
portraits that the students, among themselves, called "the
arrestometer." Portraits began to vanish from the walls.
A portrait disappeared—the professor disappeared. Another
portrait disappeared—and that professor disappeared.
Finally the apparatus indicator went off the scale: all the
portraits had been taken down.

Physics was lucky. Biology was not. Cybernetics was not,
because no one dreamed that the bourgeois science of control
would be useful for the control of rockets. Agronomy and
the whole of agriculture lay in shit. ...