Word: physicist
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Lysenko, a second-rate biologist, was enthroned because his theory that environment could produce any desired result fitted in neatly with the Communist theology. Physicist Lev Landau was tossed into jail; Physicist Abram Joffe barely escaped being shot; and Geneticist N. A. Vavilov died in a slave labor camp, while his younger brother, the president of the academy, dutifully signed the documents destroying his brother's life work...
...scientists simply ignored her. The party denounced the Einstein theory, the Copenhagen school of quantum mechanics, and cybernetics as "idealistic." But the scientists used the work of Einstein and Bohr to develop Russia's atomic bomb, and the Soviet began turning out calculators as fast as it could. Physicist Peter Kapitsa, who was placed under arrest for refusing to work on the atom bomb, is now back in favor and heads a research institute...
...Through Topchiev, the party still belabors scientists with demands that they "must not hold aloof from the ideological struggle," and if deviating intellectuals no longer disappear from the face of the earth, they can still disappear from the pages of Vestnik. After accepting an invitation to The Netherlands recently. Physicist Landau asked if he might bring along a friend. The friend, though billed as a fellow scientist, seemed to Landau's hosts to be more of a political chaperon. Freedom, it seems, can still ebb and flow like the tide, and latterly it seems to be ebbing again. Reported...
...crash-priority psychology, which often achieves spectacular results, also produced absurdities. Though lavish, laboratory equipment is apt to be overengineered, clumsy and wasteful. Says a British physicist of one laboratory: "The men in charge just sat down with a catalogue and ordered whatever they wanted. There was one fine electron-microscope that they said they hadn't gotten around to using yet, though it had been there a year...
...Damnable Hubbub." Prestige of the Britannica grew with succeeding editions, and the editors easily enlisted the world's famous men as writers. Sir Walter Scott wrote on drama. Harvard President Edward Everett, the first American contributor, wrote a biography of Washington. Lord Rayleigh, the physicist who won the Nobel Prize in 1904, was commissioned to write on "Light." He missed his deadline, but the encyclopedia was being published volume by volume in alphabetical order, and his piece was rescheduled under "Optics"-and again as "Undulating Theory of Light." It finally got in under "Wave Theory of Light...