Yet another lame comment. GPS launched on Atlas V nowadays, which uses the insanely good LOx-rich combustion Soviet engine tech. Until the fall of the Iron Curtain, American engineers believed such technology was basically impossible. It was Soviet metallurgy that made it possible.
Everyone's smartphone listens to radio beeps to geolocate.
The idea of measuring distance by the time of signal having known speed probably predates Newton. Atomic clocks - one of the technological enablements to a satellite navigation system - were initially created with masers which Basov and Prokhorov helped to invent.
You already know about the technology to launch those precise clocks to orbit.
Sputnik was the first satellite. Everyone with a smartphone relies on satellites. GPS is a more sophisticated radio beep, but Sputnik is essentially the proof of concept of the idea.
"It was October 4th, 1957. Scientists at MIT noticed that the frequency of the radio signals transmitted by the small Russian satellite increased as it approached and decreased as it moved away. This was caused by the Doppler Effect, the same thing that makes the timbre of a car horn change as the car rushes by.
This gave the scientists a grand idea. Satellites could be tracked from the ground by measuring the frequency of the radio signals they emitted, and conversely, the locations of receivers on the ground could be tracked by their distance from the satellites. That, in a nutshell, is the conceptual foundation of modern GPS."
Sir, you don't have mind discipline. You started off from the subject "scientific achievements" and ended up with "commercial achievements", so the discussion with you will be boring.
And you are totally ignoring all other points of the response. I'd be interested on a source for the Lasers, early TV work predates the soviet union, later work doesn't seem to have happened there.
There were no questions, except agressive "Really?", so I decided to skip the points. The thing is that the original author tries to put a nationalistic mask on science, i.e. "the X was invented by country Y", which is a fallacy suitable for populist debates. Science doesn't happen in vacuum, and scientific "achievements" are usually called "contributions".
Regarding your questions. 1) Three scientists received a Nobel prize for their work on lasers, you can check the wiki for names. 2) About the TV: my bad, A. Zworykin has been working in the US on the TV problem --- it's hard to trace everyone who emigrated due to the Soviet massacre. Anyway, you can find experiments, etc. for example, by Leo Theremin.
It appears that you simply don't understand the definition of the word "science", nor the meaning of "scientific". Thus your posts mix up "science", "innovation" and "commerce". You can't measure USSR in terms of "commercial success", as there were no commerce.
Microwave: you can look for the excerpts from the magazine "Trud" from 13 June 1941 (in Russian). Scientists explained their experiments with using ultra-high frequency waves for heating up meat.
Lasers, TVs: check my previous answer.
If you want to know more about scientific success in USSR, please find yourself a course on history and philosophy of science / informatics. Soviet scientists did a lot contributions to the scientific community, including in such areas like chemistry, cybernetics, neurophysiology, psychology among others, just like any other big country in the world.
I was particularly interested in the history of sound synthesis in the 1930s, which I personally find fascinating (Evgeny Scholpo, Arseny Avraamov, Boris Yankovsky). They basically implemented spectral resynthesis and wavetable techniques using light and film! The sad thing is that this history has been stocking in archives until someone accidentally found them.
> excerpts from the magazine "Trud" from 13 June 1941
Those excerpts miraculously appeared only in 2013, when another wave of Russian nationalism sweeped over.
Consider me suspicious.
> Soviet scientists did a lot contributions to the scientific community, including in such areas like chemistry, cybernetics, neurophysiology, psychology among others, just like any other big country in the world.
No. Other big countries made _actual_ inventions (US, UK, France, Germany).
You've crossed way, way over the line into nationalist flamewars on HN, repeatedly. You've routinely been uncivil to other users, and your comment have been so fixated on one (already off-topic) political agenda as to make this a single-purpose account. We ban accounts that do these things, so I've banned this one.
If you don't want to be banned on HN, you're welcome to email [email protected] and promise not to abuse the site like this in the future.
I'd better consider you a russophobic. Quite typical for eastern Europe, and ex-USSR countries.
> when another wave of Russian nationalism sweeped over
There is no Russian nationalism. You see is the distorted and fragmented reality, projected onto you from your media (I'm wandering what). The problem is that you don't really understand what are you talking about and what is the purpose of your discussion. Your messages are not connected with a single subject, you use slongans, populisms, trumpisms, but no substance. I've seen this in 2014–2015 when the Russian media were brainwashing people at insane rates.
It sounds like you know a lot about things many of us know little about, which is great, but on HN it's necessary to express those things civilly and not to respond to provocation by flaming people. If you can't do that, please don't post here until you can. This site values civility and substantiveness in discussion and is trying (not always successfully) for a higher-than-internet-median quality level.
That's commercial achievement, not scientific. The Obninsk power plant has been connected to a grid in 1954. It is useless to assess commercial achievements of the country which didn't have commerce at all. And in general, the question "who was the first" is unproductive, as science doesn't have nationality.
Well, I'm from the UK and I've heard it repeated often enough that Calder Hall was the first nuclear plant to generate power - so I did a search to confirm it and found that wiki page.
It's actually quite interesting that the Soviets had an earlier one - I guess the page should be updated?
No, that's not true - and it's sad to read on HN. I'm pretty sure Elon Musk would press ahead disregarding Russian involvement, given the available information.
LASIK derived from RK - the Soviets were trying to save on having to grind prescription glasses for people - the cornea would be removed, frozen in nitrogen to be stiffer, then placed on a machine that had 1-micron accuracy which then modified the cornea by essentially machining it; then the cornea would be re-attached.
RK was/is very much a Soviet invention, but it's not the same as external corneal reshaping (I can't remember the real term). RK uses corneal incisions to flatten the curvature without removal.
>'Isolated from Western advances in antibiotic production in the 1940s, Russian scientists continued to develop already successful phage therapy to treat the wounds of soldiers in field hospitals. [..] However, due to the scientific barriers of the Cold War, this knowledge was not translated and did not proliferate across the world.[16][17] A summary of these publications was published in English in 2009 in "A Literature Review of the Practical Application of Bacteriophage Research"'
2. Electronics: Léon Theremin work in the Soviet Union which is the basis of RFID technologies [1] [2].
3. History: Knorozov work deciphering the Mayan glyphs. He work put modern Mayan studies on a firm foundation. [3]
4. Physics: Much of the developments in dynamical systems came from "the Moscow School":
>"A more abstract approach, developed in Moscow, gained attention outside the U.S.S.R. via the translation of (Nemytskii and Stepanov, 1960), introduced by S. Lefschetz, who had himself published a text on qualitative theory a few years earlier (Lefschetz 1957). Here the first clearly-defined strange attractor – the solenoid – was described. The works of Kolmogorov, Anosov, Arnold and Sinai grew out of this "Moscow school" in the 1950-60's, with important work on ergodic theory (Sinai, 1966), geodesic flows (Anosov, 1967) and billiards (Sinai, 1970), using Kolmogorov's idea of K-systems. Some of this was motivated by S. Smale's visit to Moscow in 1961, during which he met Anosov, Arnold and Sinai and told them of the conjecture that structurally stable systems with infinitely many periodic orbits could exist (see Smale's Horseshoe, below)." [4]
5. Computer Science/Complexity Theory: "The concept of NP-completeness was developed in the late 1960s and early 1970s in parallel by researchers in the US and the USSR."
The list is very long and I don't have all day so I'm stopping here but people living in the Soviet Union made many important scientific achievements. This is not an endorsement of the Soviet Union (see Theremin's poor treatment).
>Not sure that many people are using deciphered Mayan glyphs in their daily routines.
This gets to a question about the value of history. I find history exceptionally valuable to society, but you may disagree.
>This is good, but I've asked about achievements "made in USSR" which ordinary people still use in their daily lives.
Lets ignore Bacteriophages while we are at it. Yes, they improved countless peoples health and yes this research is used in biology, but US biotechs have met difficulty commercializing this treatment in the US because while it saves lives it is hard to monetize (IP issues). But hey, if you get a MR bacterial infection you might be happy that other options exist. [0]
That leaves three things people continue to use in their daily lives:
1. RFIDs,
2. Complexity Theory (you are using it right now),
3. and Dynamical Systems advances (as seen in aircraft, boats, cars, medical devices, electronics, etc...).
And of course Russians perfected rocket technology way in XIX century, using solid rockets as a weapon.
What are you trying to prove? That inventions aren't done in vacuum and everybody stands on the shoulders of giants coming before him? Or you literally believe that USA had a half century Cold War with opponent who can't invent a thing?
The USSR's nuclear espionage helped their bomb project, but it was not essential. They more used it to check their own work, and likely stopped some detours on the road. And if their space technology was "borrowed" from the Germans, so was the US's.
Tu-144 flew before Concord. Try to explain to some people that it's hard to get a pure copy running before the original :) - I'm not surprised anymore, they'd still insist Tu-144 is merely a copy.
When Project Apollo uses Yu. Kondratyuk's (A. Shargey) staging calculations of course that's not a copying of a critical part.
"The aircraft was introduced into passenger service on 1 November 1977, almost two years after Concorde, because of budget restrictions."
Yes, they've managed to "overcame bourgeous West" with Tu-144, but because design and production was rushed - they got Paris air show crash, postponed operational services and generally bad design, forcing earlier retirement for Tu-144.
That isn't what I said. The steps necessary for making a bomb were known to Soviet scientists, the information stolen saved them some trouble of discovering which methods worked best. Valuable, but not essential.
No however it is well known that the US and Russian missile projects benefited hugely from the knowledge and expertise of WW2 German rocket scientists.
That's almost like saying Newton _borrowed_ his works from unnamed linguists of the past who invented alphabet and writing.
Russians did get a huge boost in rocket tech from von Braun's works. However it was a long way to orbital carriers. After R-1 - a copy of V-2 - USSR made R-2 with better engines (more concentrated ethanol), separatable warhead and load-bearing tanks, then R-5 with even better engines and range, then switched to kerosene engines, practically building technology from scratch (engines, for example, used structure brazen to copper-based heat wall with milled cooling channels), multiple stages (did you see how R-7 does staging? It's a ballet in air), "tulpan" launch system, producing base for still flying Semyorka.
George Sutton, author of "History of Liquid Propellant Rocket Engines" mentiones that USSR spend quite a bit more perfecting engine technology than other countries. That's part of the reason why 26 years after dissolution of USSR the technology created there is practically used with modifications on modern successful launchers (including in USA).
In general, if you have a country with big population, economic and schools producing some Nobel prize-level scientists it's hard to defend the idea that nothing of value can be made there. That doesn't diminish USSR big shortcomings but the credit is certainly due where it is.
Regarding Operation Paperclip - did you read Chertok's memoirs, where he describes his part of the story (he participated in the hunting for specialists in Germany during 1945)?
I have a friend who's into alternative history and conspiracy theories. Our discussions so far come to the point of how hard it is to have an objective criteria for correctness. Right now many people can choose beliefs and afford to stick to them even if they aren't supported by reality - because that doesn't affect them much.
In a way, my answer to your question is "it depends". For somebody with "good enough" criteria of correctness I can provide examples.
Are there any? Making iPhone copies will probably be prohibitively expensive, otherwise China will already make those in numbers. Yes they did some really lame knockoffs but I doubt you can replicate "the iPhone".
As I said in my post, the essential Japanese condition for surrender was that the Emperor remain in place.
After rejecting that, thus prolonging the war and using the atom bombs, the US ended up keeping the Emperor in place (ie accepting the previous Japanese condition) anyway.
I may be wrong, but I believe the Japanese wanted the Emperor to remain in place and retain his power - the US was merely willing to not kill him as long as he remained a figurehead and publicly renounced any claims to authority.
Whatever may have eventually been negotiated, and perhaps nothing would ever have been agreed, it disproves the myth (used to justify the atom bombs) that only being nuked forced them to consider surrender.
The recording of the Emperor's surrender had to be sneaked out to NHK studios past a military coup in progress, so certainly not everyone was convinced.
Personally, I tend to believe that the nukes, the potential cost of defending against an invasion of the mainland by the US, and Russia's invasion made surrender look like the obvious choice, but remember that the initial plan for Pearl Harbor assumed a negotiated surrender with the US which, Japan hoped, would let them keep certain territories necessary to maintain supply lines for their colonial wars, which was what they really cared about.
Fanatical resistance by the military, both due to their own racist ideals and out of the fear for self-preservation (the Japanese people, the Western world and the rest of Asia basically hated Japan's government by the end,) drew the war and the surrender out longer than it needed to be.
Although, I also believe the main reason the US dropped the atomic bombs is that we had them, and therefore needed to justify the expense of making them by using them. It's likely that, without Japan's surrender, the US would have used nuclear weapons and invaded Japan at the same time.
> Fanatical resistance by the military, both due to their own racist ideals and out of the fear for self-preservation drew the war and the surrender out longer than it needed to be.
That doesn't seem to be what you were originally arguing:
> It's odd how [Japan "fighting and fighting and fighting"] is portrayed as a negative aspect of Japan's militarism, when the Allies were fighting the same war with the same attitude.
Since you're asking me what's in it, I assume you haven't read it. Why not do that now; it's not hard to find online.
After that, please read some basic WWII history before stringing this thread out any longer, if you're seriously unaware of anything but the atom bomb that didn't go Japan's way in 1945.
> The US response was to carpet bomb Japanese cities full of civilians, carpet bomb foreign cities held by Japan holding civilians and citizens of foreign nations, etc... then to top it off, they felt fully justified to drop two nuclear bombs on two cities full of civilians in Japan to teach East-Asia a lesson.
Looks like your perception of history is... a little bit skewed.
This comes up every time Wikileaks is mentioned, and it is ridiculous every time.
Assange has stated, very clearly, that Russia is not the source and that if they had leaks related to Russia they'd publish them. But they don't. Probably because Wikileaks isn't necessary for Russian leakers: it arose because western newspapers were so reluctant to publish leaked material from western governments. But those same newspapers are desperate to publish anything that makes Russia look bad. So why go via Wikileaks, when you could go directly to the NY Times or the Guardian.
The whole "Wikileaks = Russia" line just comes off as delusional. There's no evidence, it has been explicitly denied, and the supporting arguments are very weak.
Sorry, your defensive arguments are very weak. Like "if they had leaks related to Russia they'd publish them. But they don't. Probably because Wikileaks isn't necessary for Russian leakers" - really?
What kind of an answer is that? Do you have evidence that they have leaks they're sitting on? If so, why would the leaker not just send their materials elsewhere? The point of Wikileaks is to publish, after all. You're arguing that they have lots of material they refuse to publish, and the people who provided that material oddly don't use other channels, yet you have no evidence.
I don't think Russia is planning on annexing any more territory, especially NATO-aligned states. It does make sense for the Russian Government to reduce the influence of the U.S.
Moonbase will be a lavish boondoggle designed to blow up and then activists will argue that this boondoggle must be scraped and money redirected to world hunger/saving whales etc.
Look at glorious Soviet cars, for example.
Now look at glorious Soviet massframe computers.