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by PerfectDlite 3309 days ago
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?

2 comments

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.

> There were no questions

In Soviet Russia question marks aren't marking questions!

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

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.
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.

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).

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

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

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?

> 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.

Why is that relevant at all to the discussion?
This is factually false. Obninsk was not a "closed" town. As soon as it got town status, it wasn't closed.