By Roald Z. Sagdeev
The severely acclaimed memoir that rips the curtain of secrecy off the realm of Soviet science
"Revelations and insights concerning the Soviet house application . . . it really is stable that this sort of clever guy will reside between us for a while." --The manhattan Times
"A infrequent, beneficial, insider's examine the Soviet army business machine."--Publishers Weekly
"I chanced on it attention-grabbing . . . vital not just to scientists, but additionally if you happen to type executive politics generally."--Herman Feshbach Institute Professor Emeritus Massachusetts Institute of Technology
"A actual contribution to the literature of the distance age."--Chicago Sun-Times
"This is a strong but fascinating account of the Soviet Union's clinical, area, and armed forces firm, characterised by way of Sagdeev's frank and insightful kind combined with pleasant humor and humanity."--Charles H. Townes Nobel Laureate in Physics collage of California, Berkeley
"For all who're attracted to the interplay of technology and society, and within the nature of the Soviet Union as obvious by means of a willing observer who was once even as an 'insider' and a devoted humanist, this publication is very recommended." --Physics Today
From Publishers Weekly
Sagdeev, a physicist who directed the previous Soviet Union's area examine Institute from 1973 to 1990, performed a very important function in restraining a Soviet counteroffensive to the U.S. "Star Wars" software, thereby aiding to stop an acceleration of the nuclear hands race in area. This modest, anecdotal memoir offers an extraordinary, precious insider's examine the Soviet military-industrial computing device. engaged on the U.S.S.R.'s abortive controlled-fusion application within the Nineteen Fifties, Sagdeev witnessed Stalin's harmful interference with the medical neighborhood. supplying close-ups of Brezhnev, Gorbachev and physicist/dissident Andrei Sakharov, his narrative indicates how house tasks of genuine clinical price have been hobbled whereas most sensible precedence was once given to expensive, prestige-oriented feats intended to rival these of NASA. Sagdeev is now a physics professor on the college of Maryland; his spouse, Susan Eisenhower, the book's editor, is Ike's granddaughter, including a twist to this chilly struggle account.
Copyright 1994 Reed company info, Inc.
From Library Journal
World-class scientist Sagdeev, at the moment amazing professor of physics and director of the East-West middle for house technological know-how on the collage of Maryland, has written an autobiography of his specialist occupation. (The paintings has been edited via his spouse, the granddaughter of President Dwight D. Eisenhower.) whereas the reader learns little of his own existence, this account bargains nice perception into the politics of Soviet technology and the effect of the chilly warfare in shaping medical research-East and West. As director of the distance study Institute for the Soviet Union, Sagdeev practiced perestroika sooner than the time period got here into utilization; he ultimately served as summit adviser to Mikhail Gorbachev and his technological know-how adviser. With its transparent and easy-to-read kind, absence of technical jargon, and wit and charm-even the footnotes are enjoyable-this booklet is very recommended.
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Additional info for The Making of a Soviet Scientist: My Adventures in Nuclear Fusion and Space From Stalin to Star Wars
Sample text
W. Leibniz. Eine Chronik. Frankfurt am Main: Vittorio Klostermann, , p. ix (the final phrase is taken from the slipcover). The purpose of these protracted negotiations was to bring to an end an even more protracted war: a war which raged for thirty years, the most destructive conflict of an era plagued by virtually incessant warfare. The product of these negotiations was the Peace of Westphalia, perhaps the most important treaty signed in the early modern period. But the difficulties which had prolonged first the war and then the peace negotiations lay several layers deep; the deeper strata lay well below the Westphalian diplomats’ immediate concerns or responsibilities; and the solutions to the more superficial problems which they hammered out in M¨unster and Osnabr¨uck in any case brought further problems in their wake.
The emperor’s power, by contrast, now rested primarily not on the imperial office or its resources but on the Habsburg dynasty’s hereditary lands in the southeast corner of the Empire, now enhanced by permanent accession to the Bohemian crown and, towards the end of the century, by the reconquest of the huge kingdom of Hungary as well, outside the boundaries of the Empire itself. From onward, in short, the Empire was definitively set on a Sonderweg, a more or less federal course of political development very different from the increasingly centralised and absolutist monarchies typified par excellence by contemporary France under the ‘Sun King’, Louis XIV (–).
Confessional reconciliation depended to some degree on theological reconciliation; and theological discussions were complicated in this period by the fact that they took place in a period of philosophical revolution. During the generation in which central Europe had been thrown into military and political turmoil, western Europe had begun a period of equally disorientating intellectual Youthful Vocations (–) upheaval. The limited problem of the competing world systems of Ptolemy, Copernicus, and Tycho Brahe had broadened into a clash of basic approaches to natural philosophy, pitting Galileo, Bacon, Gassendi, and Descartes against the revered authority of Aristotle.
