SCIENCE

New Zealand Listener, Volume 7, Issue 165, 21 August 1942, Page 7

SCIENCE

HE significant contribution which the new Union of Socialist Soviet Republics has. made to science is to show us that science is a collective human enterprise. The great change it brought about was to make Russians conscious for the first time of the necessary connection between the ordered development of science and the life and work of the whole community. * a Eg TREMENDOUS task faced the Soviet planners. A large proportion of the people were illiterate, only a tiny minority had any acquaintance with science or technology. The aim was to make the whole productive and cultural activity of 160 million people scientific. So the first twenty years of the Republic’s life was devoted to the double task -the building up of scientific education and the ‘application of science to industrial, agricultural, and medical needs. * * * HE methods and technique of the ‘" laboratories and equipment are all essentially similar in the Soviet and in other countries. A fundamental difference lies in the role of science in the organisation of society. In other countries politicians, leaders, and administrators. are not supposed to require any training in science. The governors of the Soviet Union consider that to ignore or even neglect technological and scientific problems in state planning is fundamentally absurd. In the Soviet, the State Planning Commission enjoys more prestige than the Foreign Office. a * % N certain branches of physical science, Soviet discoveries and application have already made a deep impression abroad, In physics, for example, no one had previously been able to explain re- . liably why materials were not much stronger than they are found to be in practice. The fundamental work of the Leningrad School of physicists was the starting point of a great advance in the understanding of the strength of materials and the ways of improving them. Proposals for radical changes such as turning coal into gas underground are also characteristic of the Soviet approach. This would eliminate at one stroke a large part of the laborious task of the miner. . tk * iT WO years ago a large number of valuable prizes were offered for the first time to Russian inventors, scientists, artists, and authors. At the inauguration of these prizes to mark his 60th birthday, Josef Stalin said: "The power and significance of established scientific tra- dition should be utilised. But the scientist must never be tradition’s slave. He must have the courage to smash the old standards and ideals when they begin to act as fetters to progress."