The Organization of Soviet and Western Science

The Organization of Soviet and Western Science:

Contrasts and Consequences

As I and my young physicist colleagues struggled to develop the hoop conjecture and to prove that black holes have no hair and to discover how they lose their hair, we also were discovering how very differently physics was organized in the U.S.S.R. than in Britain and America, and what profound effects those differences have. The lessons we learned may have some value in planning for the future, especially in the former Soviet Union, where all state institutions – scientific as well as governmental and economic – are now (1993) struggling to reorganize along Western lines. The Western model is not completely perfect, and the Soviet system was not uniformly bad!

In America and Britain there is a constant flow of young talent through a research group such as Wheeler's or Sciama's. Undergraduates may join the group for their last, senior year, but they then are sent away for graduate study. Graduate students join it for three to five years, and then are sent elsewhere for postdoctoral study. Postdocs join it for two or three years and then are sent away and expected either to start a research group of their own elsewhere (as I did at Caltech) or to join a small, struggling group elsewhere. Almost nobody in Britain or America, no matter how talented, is allowed to stay on in the nest of his or her mentor.

In the U.S.S.R., by contrast, outstanding young physicists (such as Novikov) usually remained in the nest of their mentor for ten, twenty, and sometimes even thirty or forty years. A great Soviet mentor like Zel'dovich or Landau usually worked in an Institute of the Academy of Sciences, rather than in a university, so his teaching load was small or nonexistent; by keeping his best former students, he built around himself a permanent team of full-time researchers, which became tightly knit and extremely powerful, and which might even stay with him until the end of his career.

Some of my Soviet friends attributed this difference to the failings of the British/American system: Almost all great British or American physicists work at universities, where research is often subservient to teaching and where there are inadequate numbers of permanent positions available to permit building up a strong, lasting group of researchers. As a result, there have been no theoretical physics research groups in Britain or America that can pretend to be the equal of Landau's group in the 1930s through 1950s, or of Zel'dovich's group in the 1960s and 1970s. The West, in this sense, had no hope of competing with the Soviet Union.

Some of my American friends attributed the difference to the failings of the Soviet system: It was very difficult, logistically, to move from institute to institute and city to city in the U.S.S.R., so young physicists were forced to remain with their mentors; they had no opportunity to get out and start independent groups of their own. The result, the critics asserted, was a feudal system. The mentor was like a lord and his team like serfs, indentured for most of their careers. The lord and serfs were interdependent in a complex way, but there was no question who was boss. If the lord was a master craftsman like Zel'dovich or Landau, the lord/serf team could be richly productive. If the lord was authoritarian and not so outstanding (as was commonly the case), the result could be tragic: a waste of human talent and a miserable life for the serfs.

In the Soviet system, each great mentor such as Zel'dovich produced just one research team, albeit a tremendously powerful one, one unequaled anywhere in the West. By contrast, great American or British mentors like Wheeler and Sciama produce as their progeny many smaller and weaker research groups, scattered throughout the land, but those groups can have a large cumulative impact on physics. The American and British mentors have a constant influx of new, young people to help keep their minds and ideas fresh. In those rare cases where Soviet mentors wanted to start over afresh, they had to break their ties with their old team in a manner which could be highly traumatic.

This, in fact, was destined to happen to Zel'dovich: He began building his astrophysics team in 1961; by 1964 it was superior to any other theoretical astrophysics team anywhere in the world; then in 1978, soon after the golden age ended, came a traumatic, explosive split in which almost everybody in Zel'dovich's team went one way and he went another, psychologically wounded but free from encumbrances, free to begin building afresh. Sadly, his rebuilding would not be successful. Never again would he surround himself with a team so talented and powerful as that which he, with Novikov's assistance, had led. But Novikov, now an independent researcher, would come into his own in the 1980s as the talented leader of a reconstructed team.

(Kip S. Thorne, Black Holes & Time Warps: Einstein’s Outrageous Legacy. New York: W. W. Norton & Company, Inc., 1994. Box 7.2, pages 287–288.)

Exhibit A-29

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