[z3phyr]

Th soviet mechanical and rf engineering efforts were very well regarded during the early cold war period, and I would argue, much more sophisticated. Language did not stop the USSR. It was the economic policy like banning some disciplines based on ideological grounds like cybernetics etc.

Check it out, the things for which a western scientist or engineer is given credit, were discovered/invented much earlier by soviet counterparts! What do you think about Kotelnikov?

[Symmetry]

How much of it was ideological and how much of it was just that Gosplan didn't want computers taking their power, and so Gosplan cut funding to computer development?

[myrmidon]

I consider the view "many discoveries were made much earlier by soviet counterparts" to be mostly incorrect and heavily biased.

But it is a common and easy trap for a lot of nationalities to fall into, because there are innumerable discoveries that happen before (and/or independent of) the canonical "inventor" (and you're automatically more likely to know the independent inventors if they come from your country!).

Regarding Kotelnikov specifically: You could make the same argument (re: discovery of sampling theorem) for Whittaker, who published in 1915; ultimately, though, the whole debate is mostly pointless.

I strongly believe that no single inventor so far was truly "significant", in that his nonexistence would have delayed science as a whole by more than a decade or two (consider Newton/Leibniz for calculus, Einstein/Poincaré/Hilbert for relativity, etc.).

People should not focus so much on WHO discovered a particular fact, because the cold truth is that it's mostly a personality cult and that any single scientist that ever existed, no matter how brilliant, was still replaceable (from a "human progress" kind of view). Which does not stop me from being a Fermi-fanboy.

But I completely agree with you that language did not really hinder USSR science.

[randmeerkat]

> the cold truth is that it's mostly a personality cult and that any single scientist that ever existed, no matter how brilliant, was still replaceable

I found the MBA.

[greedo]

Nah, it's really akin to the debate historians have over Great People or Inexorable events. Would calculus have been discovered had Liebniz and Newton died in a duel? Would the Panama Canal still have been built had Teddy Roosevelt not been its primary proponent? The Apollo project shows that Big Events can still happen even when it's most eloquent proponent gets a bullet to the head.

[randmeerkat]

> Apollo project shows that Big Events can still happen even when it's most eloquent proponent gets a bullet to the head.

If Sergei Korolev didn’t die suddenly and unexpectedly, the Soviets may have actually won the race to the moon. Their space program atrophied afterwards and struggled to succeed.

I really wonder at the modern obsession with associating people with cattle.

[greedo]

Cattle?

[gregw2]

I’m guessing this is a techie reference.

Computer servers can be divided into two roles in modern technical architectures… they are either “cattle” or “pets”. Pets are computer servers that have names and are always up. Cattle are servers that are transient, spun up and down as needed and do not necessarily have any long running identity/name as a component of a larger system.

http://cloudscaling.com/blog/cloud-computing/the-history-of-...

The poster is making a critiques of how by treating historical persons contributors as cattle, we are considering them a dispensable, unnamed, a commodity that is easily replaced and interchangeable and missing their very real contribution, value, and humanity.

[myrmidon]

> I found the MBA.

Nope, thats a false positive.

Also cutting the quote there heavily twists the meaning: I'm not saying those scientists were replaceable as persons, just that their effect on all of humanities scientific progress was.

Many persons have a strong notion that we owe certain discoveries to a specific person, but this does not even hold up to cursory examination in my view (those discoveries would have been made in short order by someone else).

I'm very curious though if you have counterexamples, or think the premise is otherwise flawed.

[avmich]

> I'm very curious though if you have counterexamples, or think the premise is otherwise flawed.

I suspect we can find counterexamples if look enough, though to truly present some a serious knowledge of science history is needed.

What do you think of contributions of Srinivasa Ramanujan and George Cantor?

[myrmidon]

I think some of Ramanujans results might have come significantly (more than a decade!) later without him, but I don't think that this would have held up mathematics as a field significantly.

For Cantor, I think the maximum delay in results would've been even less, but maybe the impact (=> set theory) bigger during that time?

I will concede that there is a lot of value that any specific scientist provides just from correspondence/communication alone which is very hard to quantify.

I also think if you took away whole institutions from a hypothetical timeline, like, e.g. the University of Göttingen, then the impact could be quite clear (more than just a decade of lost progress in some field). So maybe you could argue that some founders of prodigious institutions helped human science more than any single scientist? But this is highly hypothetical (if the people AT those institutions would have existed regardless). Also a distasteful thought (to me).