POPULARIZATION OF SCIENCE IN THE USSR

HAL Id: jpa-00215243

https://hal.archives-ouvertes.fr/jpa-00215243

Submitted on 1 Jan 1973

HAL is a multi-disciplinary open access archive for the deposit and dissemination of sci- entific research documents, whether they are pub- lished or not. The documents may come from teaching and research institutions in France or abroad, or from public or private research centers.

L’archive ouverte pluridisciplinaire HAL, est destinée au dépôt et à la diffusion de documents scientifiques de niveau recherche, publiés ou non, émanant des établissements d’enseignement et de recherche français ou étrangers, des laboratoires publics ou privés.

POPULARIZATION OF SCIENCE IN THE USSR

A. Baldin

To cite this version:

A. Baldin. POPULARIZATION OF SCIENCE IN THE USSR. Journal de Physique Colloques, 1973, 34 (C1), pp.C1-451-C1-452. �10.1051/jphyscol:1973163�. �jpa-00215243�

POPULARIZATION OF SCIENCE IN THE USSR

POPULARIZATION OF SCIENCE I N THE USSR A. BALDIN

Joint Institute for Nuclear Research, Dubna (From the tape recording, not reviewed by the author)

When our chairman suggested to me today that I give this talk, I said definitely not for two reasons. First, I am not a t all a specialist in popularizing science and second, I have not prepared anything a s has my bright colleague who gave u s so nice a talk, I have no statistical material,

figures and so on. But our chairman told me that there were no specialists in this subject. As to the second objec- tion, my lack of statistical material, this was removedby saying that, nowadays, it is customary that high energy physics reports have no statistical basis and further more that high energy physics has become more and more a qua- litative science. This encouraged me and here I am. Now, although I am representing Dubna, I shall speak only about the Soviet Union since Dubna is an international organiza- tion and it is difficult for me to speak f o r the members from other countries.

The questions that our chairman and I have selected a r e the following :

1) Is there public interest in high energy physics ? 2) What forms of popularization of science exist in the Soviet Union ?

3) What sort of difficulties do we have in making the contact with Society ?

I must say that public interest in high energy physics is rising. For example, when Professor Dirac visited the Soviet Union, he gave a talk at the special place where advanced people in science usually give lectures in the Center of Moscow, I t h l r i it was more crowded than for a pianist o r musician o r for literature o r theater. The popularity of Professor Dirac was enormous. There was extraordinary interest in just seeing what this great man looked like. Just recently, some people attended a lecture in memory of Professor Pomeranchuk. For his birthday,

our advanced theoricians tried to explain the ideas of Professor Pomeranchuk. They a r e modern ideas but the audience was full and interest was extraordinary. One of the most popular newspapers among the intelligentsia, Literaturnaya Gazeta, made a poll. One question was "1s the interest in physics going up o r down ?". There were different answers but the majority was that interest in precise science such a s physics and mathematics is still increasing, although some tendency showed up towards economics, social science and of course biology and the very modern ecology.

The second question was : What form of popularization do we have ? We do have educational T. V. featuring special programs with lectures in physics everyday. The interest of young people is especially concentrated on the subjects which a r e necessary for them to enter University, because education at the University is free in the Soviet Union and students even have a more o r less reasonable amount of money to be independent of their parents. Sometimes, for one position there a r e 5 o r 1 0 applicants, so they would like to be well prepared. I would say it's not a neutral interest and they would like to be smart, well informed about science. Our advanced scientists use this to organize a magazine "Quanta" on mathematics and physics, I would say this is a very good magazine. Among the organizers and senior editors of this magazine is the great mathema- tician Kolmogorov who spends a lot of time f o r populariza- tion of mathematics among the students, the young people.

It is well illustrated with pictures and has some competi- tions, problems and puzzles. We have a thick monthly magazine "Science and Life". Many scientists a r e writing for this magazine. It is very popular but it is difficult for me to give you precise information. We have many other magazines which a r e rather popular among different types

Article published online by EDP Sciences and available at http://dx.doi.org/10.1051/jphyscol:1973163

of populations of the Soviet Union. We have a special society for spreading knowledge among the people. This society organizes the type of lectures I mentioned before. They have sections in different specialties. These sections have meetings.. . I am not very active in this Society, so it is difficult to describe their activities. I would say 50 O/o of scientists (rough estimate) a r e members of this Society and give 1, 2 , 3..

.

To come to the third question, it is very difficult to explain to people what we a r e doing and why we get money, sonletimes large amounts of money. We have such diffi- culties explaining to the authorities, to politicians and to the ordinary public what we a r e doing. Simplifying the pic- tures sometimes does not help. For example, long time ago, a topologist gave lectures on topology and entitled his talk "How a tailor should cut the material for a suit rationalIytl. The audience was full of tailors but he began his talk "for simplicity let us assurme a spherical man".

The audience vanished immediately. Pontecorvo told me

that he had much difficulty when trying to explain to ordi- nary people what parity violation is. In the first part of the lecture, he tried to convince people that right and left a r e the same but after that when everybody was convinced, he had to say lWow, people have discovered that they a r e not the same". He said "I felt dishonesttf. It is difficult to explain what is going on. I personnally tried to explain photoproduction to the same people". We have an electric field and we destroy for example atoms, molecules, nu- clei..

.

And how to explain that it is a puzzle which is very impor- tant for industry. Or, for the many-body problem, a sys- tem with an infinite number of degrees of freedom, to explain why this is the most important problem of the day is practically impossible. We have similar difficulties in explaining what we a r e doing. It is a matter of trust from Society to Science. A long time ago, someone wrote : "One of the main statement in physics is that the gravitational force i s the weakest force in nature. We cannot trust a Science which makes such a strange statement because we know that gravitation is the most important force". Of course, we have the same difficulties a s you have but we try to find some pictures, some explanations, for this popularization.