Abstract
LAST August scientific workers all over the world heard with deep disappointment that the Soviet Union had officially adopted an isolationist attitude on certain branches of biology. For the first time in the U.S.S.R. thefe was established a 'party line' in one of the natural sciences. Since then there has been speculation as to whether this attitude might extend to other natural sciences, and a recent broadcast from Moscow gives point to these speculations. On January 26, 1949, the philosopher Alexander Alexandrovitch Maximov, who is a corresponding member of the Academy of Sciences, and who belongs to the staff of its Institute of Philosophy, gave a broadcast on the Moscow Radio Home Service. The theme of his talk was the correct Bolshevik attitude to natural science. He attacks those foreign physicists who "regard as synonymous the philosophical definition of matter and the objective idea of reality", and who are responsible for other "idealistic misinterpretations" in relativity and quantum theory. He indicts by name Einstein, Niels Bohr and Heisenberg. He warns his listeners against the "Kantian acrobatics of modern bourgeois atomic physicists". He contrasts the ideology of these "social traitors" in capitalist countries with the scholars in capitalist countries who "raise their voice in support of genuine science, of a scientific materialist outlook" ; and he cites with approval Langevin, Joliot-Curie, Blackett, Haldane and Levy. The purpose of the broadcast was twofold : (a) to emphasize the importance of a correct philosophical approach to physics, based on Lenin's famous "Materialism and Empiriocriticism", and (b) to encourage an attitude of "militant intransigence towards bourgeois idealistic philosophy and sociology".
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The Crisis in Soviet Science. Nature 163, 354 (1949). https://doi.org/10.1038/163354b0
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/163354b0