MITPressLog

Soviet Coup and Science

Paul Josephson, author of Lenin's Laureate: Zhores Alferov's Life in Communist Science, on the August 1991 Soviet coup against Mikhail Gorbachev.

 

Twenty years ago, on a hot summer day in late August, communist hardliners staged a coup to depose Mikhail Gorbachev. They rejected Gorbachev’s reforms of perestroika that had led to political liberalization if economic uncertainly, and to widespread questioning of communist orthodoxy. Indeed, on August 20, 1991, Gorbachev and leaders of several other Soviet republics were to meet in Moscow to sign a new union treaty that would have decentralized power from the Kremlin. To hardliners, this was an unacceptable step toward the dissolution of the USSR. On August 19, 1991, they placed Gorbachev under house arrest at his summer home in Crimea and sent troops and tanks into Moscow to secure power.

 I “watched” the coup from television in the US. The Gorbachev reforms enabled the presence of cable TV, telephone and other media as never before under Soviet power. I had spent a lot of time in the USSR in the late 1980s during perestroika. What heady times! Every week and every day brought a new development in Soviet society, economy and polity. Many intellectuals, even conservative intellectuals, at first embraced fully those reforms. They USSR had stagnated under Leonid Brezhnev’s leadership. The economy grew slowly, consumer goods were in short supply, and ideological controls over the cultural sphere led to a gray and colorless daily life.

Such leading scientists as Zhores Alferov embraced the Gorbachev reforms to reinvigorate science and education. I met with Alferov several times in Moscow and could feel his excitement over the future of the reforms. (Physicist Andrei Sakharov also embraced perestroika, but he pushed Gorbachev to go further, to embrace true democracy and willingly permit the rise of other political parties.)

But instead of a rejuvenated USSR, the economy went into free fall, and the hardliners determined to “save” the Soviet Union. Fortunately, their efforts failed. Reformers, including Boris Yeltsin, president of the Russian Federation, railed the public in the streets and turned the army against the coup plotters who wavered and gave up.

The Soviet Union did break up at the end of 1991, but with it the scientific enterprise lost its financial support and esteemed status. Alferov reaffirmed his communist affiliation in the 1990s to save his beloved science from what he believed were misguided policies of the Russian government.

 

August Fools' Day

It may not be official, but National Tell a Joke Day has been celebrated for years. Prepare your one-liners with help from a few MIT Press books:

 

Inside Jokes: Using Humor to Reverse-Engineer the Mind
By Matthew M. Hurley, Daniel C. Dennett, and Reginald B. Adams, Jr.

 “You can tell a joke in one crowd and be rewarded with laughs, yet in another group be repaid with anger. Here’s a joke that some find funny, though others might not agree and some may even be offended:

Q: What has two legs and bleeds?

A: Half a dog.”

 

 

Laughter: Notes on a Passion
By Anca Parvulescu

Uncovering an archive of laughter, from the forbidden giggle to the explosive guffaw.

“Laughter is a motion, forceful, sudden and repetitive; and it is the sound of a bursting, inarticulate voice… As for the passional chemistry needed to produce laughter: it always involves a dose of wonder, sometimes joy, sometimes hatred, sometimes both joy and hatred.”

 

 

The Odd One In: On Comedy
By Alenka Zupančič

Zupančič examines the mechanisms and processes by which comedy lets the odd one in.

Comedy by its nature is difficult to pin down with concepts and definitions, but as artistic form and social practice it is a mode of tarrying with a foreign object—of including the exception. Philosophy's relationship to comedy, Zupančič writes, is not exactly a simple story (and indeed includes some elements of comedy).

 

 

The Artist’s Joke
Edited by Jennifer Higgie

Jokes and humor in avant-garde and contemporary art, as discussed by writers and artists ranging from Freud and Picasso to Andrea Fraser, Guerilla Girls, and Slavoj Zizek.

Ever since Freud's Jokes and Their Relation to the Unconscious appeared in 1905, humor both light and dark has frequently surfaced as a subversive, troubling, or liberating element in art. The Artist's Joke surveys the rich and diverse uses of humor by avant-garde and contemporary artists.

Book Lovers Day

If you missed Do Nothing But Read Day, don't despair--today is Book Lovers Day. Here's a list of books we think all "book" worms should check out.

 

The Four Books on Architecture
By Andrea Palladio
Translated by Robert Tavernor and Richard Schofield

The first English translation of Palladio in over 250 years, and the only translation available in modern English.

 

 

The SuperCollider Book
Edited by Scott Wilson, David Cottle and Nick Collins

The essential reference to SuperCollider, a powerful, flexible, open-source, cross-platform audio programming language.

 

 

The Little Black Book of Grisélidis Réal: Days and Nights of an Anarchist Whore (Semiotext(e))
By Jean-Luc Hennig
Translated by Ariana Reines with Grisélidis Réal 

Reflections of a "revolutionary whore" and champion of sexual freedom and prostitutes' rights.

 

 

The Book of Michael of Rhodes: A Fifteenth-Century Maritime Manuscript, Volumes 1, 2, and 3
Edited by Pamela O. Long, David McGee and Alan M. Stahl

The first publication and translation into English of a manuscript by a fifteenth-century Venetian seaman, including treatises on shipbuilding, mathematics, astrology, and calendrical computation. 

 

 The Grid Book
By Hannah B Higgins

Ten grids that changed the world: the emergence and evolution of the most prominent visual structure in Western culture.

 

 

 

The Big Book of Concepts
By Gregory L. Murphy

A comprehensive introduction to current research on the psychology of concept formation and use.

 

 

 

 The Boulevard Book: History, Evolution, Design of Multiway Boulevards
By Allan B. Jacobs, Elizabeth Macdonald and Yodan Rofé

A celebration of the multiway boulevard and an argument for its revival, with design guidelines and historic examples.

 

 

A Slim Book about Narrow Content
By Gabriel M. A. Segal
Cloth / June 2000
Gabriel Segal's concern is whether certain psychological properties—specifically, those that make up what might be called the "cognitive content" of psychological states—are relational or intrinsic.

 

 

Fish-Inspired Vehicles?

Happy Monday! Here's an excerpt from How to Catch a Robot Rat by Agnès Guillot and Jean-Arcady Meyer to kick off the week.

Forms

Forms present in nature have mathematical properties that have inspired inventors.

In 1420, appearing before the eminent committee that questioned his competence to construct the cupola of Santa Maria del Fiore in Florence, Filippo Brunelleschi rapped an egg on the table and crushed the shell lightly at the base. Everyone could see that the egg remained vertical and immobile, whereas if the architect had tried to explain in words the planned construction, to do it would have seemed impossible. This egg presented in Florentine style (later used by Christopher Columbus) must have been convincing because Brunelleschi obtained carte blanche, and the gigantic dome that he built is still in place. He conceived it (by coincidence?) according to a principle that recalls the eggshell, so that bricks laid fishbone style mutually block each other and thus totally bypass the need for classic supports such as wooden arches. An ingenious encasing of two cupolas likewise ensures a good distribution of pressure.

An egg obviously does not contain arches, which would obstruct the embryo in development, yet its structure is capable of resisting considerable force: the shell of a hen's egg is 0.3 millimeters thick and can withstand up to 3.0 kilograms of pressure, and that of an ostrich egg is ten times thicker and can withstand a pressure twenty times stronger! The shells expoloit a "trick": the crystals of the mineral salts that constitute them are oriented toward the center of the egg and are self-blocking, like the bricks in the dome of Florence. Various architects--including the Germans Frei Otto, Carl Zeiss, and Heinz Isler--have recently adopted these characteristics to calculate the exact thickness needed to cover various domes or to establish force lines for immense stretched structures.

The oblong form is known to move rapidly in the air and in water without too much effort. Bizarrely, marine animals are also the best models for terrestrial or aerial mobiles! For example, the engineers of Daimler AG are currently trying out the form of the tropical boxfish to save precious liters of fuel in future automobiles. This research has resulted in a prototype presented in Washington in 2005. Although the animal presents an almost cubic belly, this characteristic makes it paradoxically very hydrodynamic and even, according to measurements undertaken by engineers, more aerodynamic than current cars, with a coefficient of air penetration of 0.06 instead of 0.30!  The "Mercedes-Benz bionic car" would boast a coefficient of 0.19 and could save 20 percent in fuel and 80 percent in nitrous oxide emissions. Its body, like the rigid carapace of the fish, is conceived as if it were composed of numerous hexagonal panels supported by a metallic vertebral column. Such a car would thus be very competitive in both lightness and robustness, the two great principles of both nature and the automobile industry.

Even an airplane of the future might be shaped like a fish, too. The Smartfish, being developed by several international companies and research laboratories at the initiative of Swiss engineer Koni Schafroth, is inspired by the form of several fish, especially the tuna, the fastest and most agile animal in the sea. A meterwide miniprototype has already successfully achieved first flight, in April 2007...

R.I.P. Jonathan Tucker

We're saddened to pass on news of the passing of Jonathan B. Tucker, who was found dead at his Washington, D.C. home on July 31, a few days shy of his 57th birthday.

Tucker, a native of Boston, was an expert in chemical biological weapons, and his work straddled the worlds of science and policy. He spent 15 years at the Monterey Institute’s James Martin Center for Nonproliferation Studies. According to an obituary in the Washington Post, he was awaiting confirmation to a new position at the Department of Homeland Security at the time of his death.

Tucker was the editor of the 2000 book Toxic Terror: Assessing Terrorist Use of Chemical and Biological Weapons. Before he died he completed work on a new edited collection: Innovation, Dual Use, and Security: Managing the Risks of Emerging Biological and Chemical Technologies. That book will be published in the Spring of next year.

He will be missed.