[PerfectDlite]

> a lot of excellent engineers and scientist that worked on technology in USSR.

Name me THREE scientific achievements "made in USSR" which ordinary people still use in their daily lives.

No, AK machine gun will not do. And sputnik is no go as well - nobody listens to radio beeps nowadays.

Can you? Just three of them? Surely, 70 years of scientific achievements will do wonders, right?

[Robotbeat]

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.

[PerfectDlite]

> Everyone's smartphone listens to radio beeps to geolocate

Are you telling me that Soviets invented GPS?

[avmich]

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.

[PerfectDlite]

So, GPS wasn't invented by Soviets and nobody is listening to Soviet radiobeats. What's your point then?

[Robotbeat]

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.

[PerfectDlite]

Sputnik was a proof of GPS concept?

That's... amazing.

[avmich]

My point is that people miss points :) .

[usaphp]

Did you read his comment?

[oscii]

- Lasers - TV (Boris Rosing, Vladimir Zworykin) - Nuclear power plant - Artificial heart - Microwave owen (1941)

[PerfectDlite]

1. Lasers? Invented by Soviets?

2. Vladimir Zworykin was a Soviet scientist? Really?

3. First soviet nuclear power plant was highly classified. First commercial nuclear power plant was created in US.

4. Artificial heart - for a dog. Not for a human.

5. And as for microwave oven in 1941 - is this another Russian myth?

[oscii]

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.

[detaro]

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.

[oscii]

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.

[PerfectDlite]

> There were no questions

In Soviet Russia question marks aren't marking questions!

[PerfectDlite]

And I'm still wondering about that mysterious Soviet microwave oven in 1941.

[PerfectDlite]

I've said "scientific achievements "made in USSR" which ordinary people still use in their daily lives"

So, yes, basically - commercial achievements for ordinary people.

[oscii]

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.

[PerfectDlite]

Ok, let's talk about scientific success in USSR.

I'd like to see sources to lasers, microwave ovens and TVs which were invented by Soviets.

[arethuza]

"The world's first commercial nuclear power station, Calder Hall at Windscale, England, was opened in 1956"

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_power

[oscii]

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.

[arethuza]

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?

[PerfectDlite]

> The Obninsk power plant has been connected to a grid in 1954

Are you aware that Obninsk was a "closed" city and wasn't marked on the Soviet maps initially?

So whole town was classified, among the power plant.

[detaro]

Why is that relevant at all to the discussion?

[thriftwy]

This is factually false. Obninsk was not a "closed" town. As soon as it got town status, it wasn't closed.

[baursak]

NASA cannot get stuff into space anymore without Soviet rockets. That's today, now.

[patrickg_zill]

SpaceX? Blue Orion? ULA + Ball Aerospace?

[usaphp]

The main reason of space x existence is exactly the outcome of the OP point

[avmich]

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.

[usaphp]

He would but the government would not be forced to give him a contract and subsidy him. He even had to go to court to sue Air Force for giving important national contracts to Russia: http://www.businessinsider.com/elon-musk-lawsuit-against-the...

[patrickg_zill]

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.

[pinewurst]

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.

[PerfectDlite]

> save on having to grind prescription glasses for people

Are you implying that removing cornea and re-attaching it will be _cheaper_ than grinding prescription glasses?

[EthanHeilman]

1. Medicine: Advanced phage therapy

>'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).

[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phage_therapy

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/L%C3%A9on_Theremin#Return_to_t...

[2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Thing_(listening_device)

[3]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yuri_Knorozov#Key_research

[4]: http://www.scholarpedia.org/article/History_of_dynamical_sys...

[5]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cook%E2%80%93Levin_theorem#Con...

[PerfectDlite]

This is good, but I've asked about achievements "made in USSR" which ordinary people still use in their daily lives.

Not sure that many people are using deciphered Mayan glyphs in their daily routines.

[EthanHeilman]

>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...).

[0]: https://www.phagetherapycenter.com

[gm-conspiracy]

Soft contact lenses?

Synthetic diamonds?

That's two off the top of my head.

[PerfectDlite]

Soft contact lenses were invented by Czech scientists.

Synthetic diamonds were created by French chemist in 19th century.

[avmich]

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?

[PerfectDlite]

> And of course Russians perfected rocket technology way in XIX century, using solid rockets as a weapon.

Russians? Not Chinese or British or Americans, but Russians?

I'm amazed on number of Russian myths here.