Imaginarium of Science. Part 1

2024 Author: Seth Attwood | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-12-16 15:55

Modern science has one important drawback - it is a very "financially intensive" product. Although it has separate areas, which, in general, do not require special costs. Brain and pen. Like some kind of linguistics. Mathematics, in its especially theoretical guises, also does not require more. Philosophy … But for the most part, the one that sets the highest rate of development of modern civilization, science is a very costly area of human activity. Physics, which studies the foundations of the structure of the universe, matter and the laws of its motion, now requires the creation of very expensive experimental devices. The Large Hadron Collider - LHC, which has already become known even to journalists (this is a huge accelerator of charged particles with a diameter of 27 km), demanded 1.5 billion euros for its construction. ITER - an experimental thermonuclear reactor, the construction of which is just beginning, will require even more - 4.6 billion euros, and experiments on it within 20 years will require about the same amount.

Let's imagine for a moment that the governments of many countries have not allocated this money. This means that there will be no discoveries that will be associated with experiments on these installations. Physics will begin to mark time. At least in the field of high energy physics and plasma physics. Other sciences, although less demanding on scientific equipment, are also not far behind in their financial costs.

Where am I leading? To a simple thought: science develops where money is invested in it. And where they invest more, there it develops faster. Thus, science becomes dependent on the political elite, which distributes financial flows, even if the scientists themselves represent a very free and independent community. They can chat about anything, but they won't make great discoveries. The times are not right. It was Newton who needed one apple to discover universal gravitation. Except for your own head, of course. Hundreds of heads and a wagon of apples are not enough for today's physicists to get at least some valuable scientific fact. And in the conditions of financial dependence, science has turned into a rather tough bureaucratic system - it has its own officials who distribute funds between individual groups of researchers. These funds also appear for a reason. There is a fear of war - the government allocates resources for the creation of a nuclear bomb. There is a fear of an energy collapse - the money goes to the creation of a thermonuclear reactor. At the same time, those areas of science suffer, which, although they are close to important discoveries for mankind, but due to the approved policy of spending funds, remain without the necessary funding for this. Thus, science in its development is moving in a not entirely natural way - from discovery to discovery. There is a clearly defined direction given by the political establishment, the political and economic situation.

However, the reality is even more complicated. Narrow clan interests within the political elite also interfere in the development process. These clans do not always benefit from scientific progress in a particular area. Will a perpetual motion machine be beneficial to oil tycoons? They hold the whole world by the throat and suddenly bam - a perpetual motion machine! Oil became needed only in the form of polyethylene for packaging. Do they need it? They don't need it. And here we can remind you of something. 44th US President George W. Bush 1978-84 headed the oil company "Arbusto Energy / Bush Exploration", and in 1986-90. - runs the oil company "Harken". Vice President Dick Cheney 1995-2000 - the head of the oil company "Halliburton". Condoleezza Rice 1991-2000- the head of the oil company "Chevron", which named her an oil tanker. The autobiography of the elder Bush, George Herbert Walker Bush, 41st President of the United States, also includes the organization and ownership of an oil company. But he was also the director of the CIA … The interests of the business of those in power very often do not coincide with the interests of science. Science can devalue their already accumulated assets. And it is safe to assume that the inventor of a perpetual motion machine, be it suddenly invented, is in great danger. Yes, even not eternal, but anyone, but working on something cheaper than oil. Work on the creation of something similar and dangerous to the oil business will be shut down at the very initial stage. The conflict of interests of the political elite with the logic of scientific progress is not a hypothesis. This is an obvious fact, and the interests of the oil business here are just a small example. In life, everything is even more serious. Some well-known scientific and technological advances may only be clever fraud, carried out for purely political purposes.

An article by Stanislav Georgievich Pokrovsky (physicist, candidate of technical sciences) entitled "Stopping the Scientific and Technological Revolution" significantly supplements such reasoning and gives a lot of supporting factual material. Even with regard to doubts about the reality of an American visit to the moon, although the author touched on this scandalous topic in passing. He wrote about this in more detail in other articles, and his arguments supplement the book of Doctor of Physical and Mathematical Sciences A. I. Popova “Americans on the Moon. Great Breakthrough or Space Scam? " Together with the book by Yuri Mukhin "The US Lunar Scam" and a series of articles by Arkady Veliurov "The Pepelats fly to the Moon", they create almost exhaustive evidence that the Apollo flights were only a hoax on a global scale. Moreover, the political leadership of the USSR knew about it and participated in hiding the truth. How was this possible? Pokrovsky's article also reveals the possible secret springs of such a conspiracy.

If we briefly outline the main theses of the article, then we get the following statements.

1. From the very birth of the USSR, science has been viewed by the Bolshevik government as the most important institution of socialism, an institution of power. Science in Soviet society is becoming the most important branch of government and this led to the success of the industrialization of the country, the highest rates of economic development.
2. Party and Soviet apparatus, who in the 30s, nevertheless, through the communists of the lower, active level, demonstrated his own necessity, simply overcoming class resistance, dying under the bullets of kulaks, setting an example of labor discipline, self-denial, - by the 1960s became wedding general, absolutely an extra link of management … The creative intelligentsia did not yet understand this, but the party apparatus itself was beginning to understand.
3. Similar processes were going on in the United States, where economic growth and technological development led to the emergence of "golden collars" - junior scientific and engineering personnel and representatives of intellectual blue-collar professions. In the 60s, this stratum was already quite visible and politically active, and by 1968 the United States was on the verge of a revolution in the wake of protests against the Vietnam War.
4. Two social groups in two countries with opposite social systems - found themselves in the face of the same danger of loss his "chosen" place above society …
5. In the 60s, the Soviet project dominated the preferences of the peoples of the world … This was the period when communism was advancing on all fronts. Counteraction to this offensive in the realm of real military-technical and economic confrontation, as US State Counselor Henry Kissinger was forced to admit, was futile. It was possible to oppose the advance of communism only political methods.
6. To stop the advance of communism, it was necessary first of all to stop Soviet science … The party apparatus in the USSR was also interested in this.

The article contains many specific examples:

“First of all, this affected the choice of an independent path of development by the electronics and computer technology industry. The place for these industries was determined - behind the Americans. well, do not go with your crazy. The bourgeois know how to count money, if they do not go into this business, therefore, it is futile …"

Since I have worked at a scientific institute since 1985, immediately after graduating from the physics department of the university, all this is familiar to me from my own experience. I was engaged in electronics, and as a young research trainee, the ideology of copying, which had taken root in it, was completely incomprehensible to me. Copied each microcircuit! We diligently achieved the similarity of characteristics, and sometimes even made them better. All this was dictated by the need to copy the final product - computers, processor boards, where these microcircuits served as elements. And this despite the fact that in the 60s we did not lag behind in our own developments at all! My mother worked as a programmer at the computing center, where the Soviet computer "Minsk-22" was located. As a fifth-grader, I came to her work and looked with admiration at the cabinets, sparkling with multi-colored lights, at punch cards and punched tape with programs. The huge control panel reminded me of the cockpit of a starship. By today's standards, the computing power of that machine did not exceed the power of a modern calculator, but it was not better in the West then! Then there were Minsk-32, M-5000 …

The last truly serial and independent product of domestic electronics was probably the "BESM-6" computer. The development of the BESM-6 machine, the chief designer of which was Academician S. A. Lebedev, was completed at the end of 1966. It was the world's first computer with a conveyor processor architecture. The machine entered service in 1967. Performing about 1 million arithmetic operations per second, it was performed on semiconductors, on an element base that allows a high switching frequency (the main clock frequency is 10 MHz). In terms of its characteristics and architecture, the BESM-6 machine may well be attributed to machines of the 3rd generation (that is, on microcircuits), although it was on discrete "hinged" parts - transistors, that is, on the technological basis of machines of the second generation … This machine had a record speed at the time of its creation! Everything was counted on it. From school "2x2" to the explosions of nuclear bombs. She never hung up. She worked day and night. Twenty years old. Its release was discontinued only in 1986, when the full performance potential was finally exhausted and could not be compared with newcomers made on integrated circuits. A total of 355 vehicles were produced.

Modern reference books often indicate that BESM-6 was inferior to the American CDC-6600, created almost simultaneously with it in 1966 by the famous American inventor of supercomputers Seymour Cray and supposedly having a performance of up to 3 million operations per second. However, this primacy of the Americans is very controversial - with equal processor clock frequencies of 10 MHz, the machines differed significantly architecturally and BESM-6 was not an outsider at all. The BESM-6 central processor had a pipeline allowing to combine the execution of various stages of operations on one processor cycle. This increased the performance of the system in the number of stages in the pipeline. The American CDC-6600 did not have a pipeline, but some of the logical elements of the processor were executed independently and theoretically could perform operations simultaneously. There were 10 of these elements and therefore the characteristics indicated a peak performance 10 times higher than it was achievable in practice. More honestly, the Americans indicate the performance of the CDC-6400 machine - a cheaper version of the 6600 without parallel modules in the central processor - 200 kFLOPS (200 thousand floating point operations per second).

Americans very energetically defend their primacy in computing and do not hesitate to lie. Even Wikipedia broadcasts their lies that the BESM-6 repeated the architecture of the CDC-1604, an older development by Seymour Kray. The lie was based only on the fact that BESM-6 and CDC-1604 had the same bit depth of data and commands, and that some application programs developed at the CERN International Nuclear Research Center were transferred from CDC-1604 to BESM-6 by specialists from the Soviet Institute of Nuclear JINR research. This lie is especially funny now, when the 32-bit format of instructions and data has become the de facto standard, and processors from different AMD and Intel companies, having different architectures, are at the same time compatible even in the instruction set. Much more plausible would be the statement that Seymour Cray borrowed the principle of the conveyor from the BESM-6 when developing his next machine, the CDC-7600. It was this machine, created two years later by BESM-6, which possessed a conveyor organization of the processor similar to BESM-6 and could compete with BESM-6 in performance.

BESM-6, the leader of the computer industry unrecognized by history, had a record speed and possessed a completely original architecture. However, in the year BESM-6 was put into operation, on December 30, 1967, the Central Committee and the Council of Ministers issued a joint decree on the development of a Unified Series of Electronic Computing Machines. This was a unique resolution - for the first time at such a high level the fate of the further development of computer technology in the country was decided. The Scientific Research Center for Electronic Computing (NITSEVT) was created, and other organizations were united under its leadership. And the question of what should be a single series of software-compatible machines of various speeds was suddenly decided in favor of copying American computers. In 1968, the Ministry of Radio Industry began work on reproducing the architecture of the IBM 360 software compatible family. In December 1969, this version was finally approved. Interestingly, this happened almost immediately after the finals of the lunar race - Apollo 11 took off from the NASA cosmodrome at Cape Kennedy on July 16, 1969. The fact that instead of the BESM line they began to produce the IBM-360 was a step back - none of the IBM computers then surpassed the BESM in performance. One of the arguments then was the opinion that along with copying computers, we would get his software for free, which IBM had quite rich. However, the BESM software was not too inferior to him - there were compilers Fortran, Algol, Autocode MADLEN, the Lisp interpreter. It was possible to use the languages Simula, Analyst, Aqua, Sibesm-6, the metalanguage of R-grammars. Who will remember such languages now? We gave up not only on the development of original computer technology, but also on our own programming languages, on our operating systems. We passed the entire industry as a whole. The opinion of the famous programming theorist E. Dijkstra about this decision of the Soviet government sounded like this - "this is the greatest victory of the West in the Cold War."

Author - Maxson