Russian Science: Discussion Thread

Chances are, this is bs. What he is suggesting they do is exactly what he mentioned they did at the start - give the money to an organization and they distribute it.

Maybe he got denied funding.

As well, if people want to move abroad, let them. Brain drain doesnt exist if everyone is educated.

But, I bet after some time, these specialists and new ones will find other methods. Previous system was real bad.

The problem is, all these specialists (in all countries) will talk about how important their field of expertise are, and how they need lots of funding. It seems Russia is funding now organizations based upon the importance the research will be. Hence fund them. So there could be a lot of BS research like there is here. If they are hurting for cash, maybe they should look at getting research grants from private enterprises and other agencies.

Moscow State University president calls for returning astronomy to school curricula

PLATEAU SHATZHATMAS, North Caucasus, December 13. /TASS/. Russian higher education community insists on returning astronomy as an academic discipline to general school curricula, Dr. Viktor Sadovnichy, the president of Moscow Lomonosov State University said on Saturday.

He took part in a gala ceremony of opening the Caucasus Mountainous Observatory in Russia’s North Caucasian region of Karachai-Cherkessia.

“I think astronomy must be returned to the curricula of general schools,” he said.

Reforms depend on the people who carry them out and “lopsided decisions occur at times,” Dr. Sadovnichy said.

He indicated that fundamental sciences, which are the locomotives of human development, suffered considerable losses in Russia in previous years. One of the landmarks of Russian science, the legendary Moscow Planetarium that had become an integral element of the history of Moscow City, was practically eliminated.

Moscow State University helped with it re-establishment and reconstruction. “Now the lines of people waiting for admittance are as huge as the ones described by /Soviet poet of the 1920’s and 1930’s/ Vladimir Mayakovsky,” Dr. Sadovnichy said. “We’ve begun to fight for astronomy.”

“Everything is getting restored step by step,” he said. “Theme compositions have already made a comeback and considerable efforts are being made in mathematics.”

“We’ve rebuffed an assault on the system of inter-school competitions in academic subjects and it embraces almost two million school kids at present,” Dr. Sadovnichy said.

He also recalled recent proposals to revive school-leaving exams in history and to make enter them on the list of mandatory Unified State Examinations.

“As the next step, we’ll insist on the return of astronomy as a subdivision of some other discipline or a separate school subject,” he said.

Astronomy
Is this a joke?

In Siberia, university-led consortium develops advanced OLED matrix

Researchers at Siberia’s Tomsk State University of Control Systems and Radio Electronics (TUSUR) have created Russia’s first prototype of a full-color organic OLED matrix developed by using printing technology, and have also come up with an instrumentation system to analyze the characteristics of such matrices, TUSUR announced.

TUSUR has teamed up with scientific and industrial partners in Siberia and other Russian regions to develop a brand new technology of printing organic displays. The project is aimed at using printing methods to create domestic organic LED semiconductor based matrices.

“OLED displays are superior in many ways to plasma and LC ones, but this country still doesn’t have its own technology to produce these… A technology will be developed to help set up shop completely independent from foreign suppliers,” said Alexander Shelupanov, TUSUR’s vice rector for research activity.

One of TUSUR’s partners in the endeavor, St. Petersburg’s Institute of High-Molecular Compounds, is responsible for the synthesis of raw material, or ‘powders.’ In Tomsk, another partner, Tomsk State University, is tasked with making a special ‘powder’-based printing solution, and also with determining the composition and parameters of solvents. TUSUR is in charge of the entire effort, enabling the printing process and assessing its overall results.

Sweet, future Russian 100% made OLED TV's. If they can produce enough of them and make them cheap, they could lead the OLED market since there is really nothing out there in decent price.

sepheronx wrote:In Siberia, university-led consortium develops advanced OLED matrix

Researchers at Siberia’s Tomsk State University of Control Systems and Radio Electronics (TUSUR) have created Russia’s first prototype of a full-color organic OLED matrix developed by using printing technology, and have also come up with an instrumentation system to analyze the characteristics of such matrices, TUSUR announced.

TUSUR has teamed up with scientific and industrial partners in Siberia and other Russian regions to develop a brand new technology of printing organic displays. The project is aimed at using printing methods to create domestic organic LED semiconductor based matrices.

“OLED displays are superior in many ways to plasma and LC ones, but this country still doesn’t have its own technology to produce these… A technology will be developed to help set up shop completely independent from foreign suppliers,” said Alexander Shelupanov, TUSUR’s vice rector for research activity.

One of TUSUR’s partners in the endeavor, St. Petersburg’s Institute of High-Molecular Compounds, is responsible for the synthesis of raw material, or ‘powders.’ In Tomsk, another partner, Tomsk State University, is tasked with making a special ‘powder’-based printing solution, and also with determining the composition and parameters of solvents. TUSUR is in charge of the entire effort, enabling the printing process and assessing its overall results.

Sweet, future Russian 100% made OLED TV's.  If they can produce enough of them and make them cheap, they could lead the OLED market since there is really nothing out there in decent price.

Hope they patented this tech and when can i order one from amazon.

Very promising development of more efficient superconductivity. Russian scientist have created a super super conductive materials that can hold people literary in the air.   Superconductivity is not new.. but the level they have taken this science is super amazing..  The video is in spanish , could not find any in other language.. but the images speak for itself. about the possibilities for new forms of personal transport. other than train.. but also new sports ,and also could be used to replace electrical power lines in cities and for laboratories to maintain two elements separated.. they say the possibilities of this new superconductivity technique is the the next BIG thing .

Interesting

Russia successfully tested anti-gravity engine Leonov

An anti-gravity engine?

flamming_python wrote:An anti-gravity engine?

Looks like a crank to me. Some of the theoretical questions he is asking are very interesting but I do not think there is
any actual application of this theory. The videos on his blog are just stupid.

kvs wrote:

flamming_python wrote:An anti-gravity engine?

Looks like a crank to me.  Some of the theoretical questions he is asking are very interesting but I do not think there is
any actual application of this theory.   The videos on his blog are just stupid.

Moreover in the comments on his blog he's explaining about how he has little chances of breaking through into real investment and production, as the 'big man is keepin' him down'. That's to say how he has no hope of funding while so much has been invested into conventional rocket technology and the rocket engine makers are such big players in the Russian space industry.

Which is a sure sign he's full of shit. If he actually published and explained his patents and findings, he'd easily win the Nobel Prize in Physics; probably a couple in a row - and would get worldwide recognition, fame, fortune and as much investment as he desires both from Russia and abroad.

But of course he's not going to do that; he's just going to publish a few videos of a tin can on wheels propelling itself a couple metres. And then wait 6 years for everyone to have forgotten about him, and then come back and give an interview to some website.

flamming_python wrote:An anti-gravity engine?

Torsion field stuff I think. If you know that I mean))

Sounds more like a ZPM.

Viktor wrote:Interesting  

Russia successfully tested anti-gravity engine Leonov

but if true(very unlikely, but we'll see) hope he takes kickstarter for a gravity gun

GarryB wrote:Being able to manipulate gravity would be an enormous breakthrough... whether it is a wave or a field... gravity and acceleration are related.

Being able to separate an object from the gravity field or gravity waves around it means the propulsion needed to take off from earth and leave earths orbit would amount to that needed to overcome air friction... in other words if you were not in a hurry the power of a ceiling fan would get you into orbit.... and beyond.

You could cancel the gravity of Earth and use the moons gravity to take you to the moon...

Yep which is exactly why it's about as likely as my ass for the next 300 years.

Of course gravity imparts energy/potential energy to any mass and there's no way around that. So either way you'll need a power source that would give enough power to enable an object to achieve escape velocity; whether its an engine within the object itself that effectively propels it without having to eject mass (i.e. circumventing Newton's 3rd law by just using that same amount of energy to counteract gravity instead), or having some sort of anti-gravity generator on the ground which emits some sort of narrow zone where all the matter within will have the Earth's gravity cancelled out for them (would take up a hell of a lot of power).
The former case seems to be what this hoo-haa here is about, but I'm highly skeptical to say the least.

On a side-note I remember when I was a kid I had a PS1, and the game Wipeout on it. Basically the story in Wipeout as far as I can recall - is that anti-gravity engines, at least in some form, were developed by the year 2018; and though they were invented somewhere in Europe or North America - there were some problems and at least one of the inventors went to Russia to pitch his technology there; which investors or the Russian government eagerly agreed to fund.
As a result by 2050 or so, there were at least 4 anti-gravity tech companies in the world; who built anti-gravity racing craft and sponsored championships in order to demonstrate their technology, including for potential military clients - and the biggest company with the fastest AG craft in the game is actually the Russian one.

collegeboy16 wrote:
but if true(very unlikely, but we'll see) hope he takes kickstarter for a gravity gun

forgot about the hoverboard- give it to me, im already wearing my pockets out and cap worn backward.

Aside from the issue of cranks, the established theory pertaining to gravity (GR) is rife with problems and
has a dogmatic cult-like enforcement in the scientific community. Papers are dismissed as being too speculative
when the whole subject is one big speculation.

The so-called tests (e.g. precession of the perihelion of the planet Mercury around the Sun) "proving" GR are a joke.
There are an infinite number of theories that can fit these tests. In GR the claim is made that matter-energy tells
spacetime how to distort and spacetime tells the matter-energy how to move. But there is no actual instrument
of this communication. There is no field just magical distorting geometry. This is why talking about gravitons and
GR as being self-consistent is stupid. The notion of gravitons comes from field theory attempts to substitute GR.
GR has no field to quantize and hence on gravitons. This lack of a quantizable field has been the source of the stall
in the development of a theory of gravity consistent with quantum mechanics and all the other forces. We have
attempts to work around this "magic spacetime geometry distortion" of GR with loop-quantum gravity and string theory.

There is a stream of alternative theoretical thought (e.g. http://arxiv.org/abs/gr-qc/0204062v1) which is basically
a fundamental challenge to the notions on which GR rests. Frankly, the period in time in which GR appeared was
just too early (it predates quantum mechanics) and subsequent core revisions are much more realistic (BTW, they
satisfy all of the GR tests). Anti-gravity actually has physical sense in field theory. There is no anti-gravity in GR.

So what is 'anti-gravity' exactly if it has been observed not even once; not in nature, not experimentally?

Though you hit upon a good point when you bring up gravity as something where it's not so easy to define a 'field' as such.

We talk about an electro-magnetic field.. basically it's a region of space time where charged particles will behave differently; they are affected, their trajectories change as they're acted upon by a force; each other.
Neutrally-charged particles on the other hand aren't affected at all.

We also hear talk of a 'gravitational field', most often in science fiction although I presume it's an actual scientific term too. On the face of it, it has similaries to electro-magnetism; in that it's a region of space time where particles with mass will behave differently; a force will act upon them; manifested by each of them on everything else.
Like their neutrally-charged particles in electro-magnetic fields; particles/waves without mass (e.g. light) don't exert or feel any gravitational force at all - YET, they are still affected and their trajectories do change, as space-time itself is curved by gravity; the geometry warps as you said and light has no choice but to travel through that geometry.

Perhaps the answer is is that we really are missing a few pieces of the puzzle in regards to gravity.
After all, electro-magnetism can affect particles without charge too.. indirectly, if they form a molecular structure through which charged particles flow freely - then a force can be exerted by the magnetic field on the whole object. Indeed all molecular structures and structures of matter in general are formed by electro-magnetism (and in part, the strong & weak forces). So defining electro-magnetism as a 'field' as such - is not actually so simple either.

Maybe something like that is going on with gravity too. Gravitons could actually be evenly spaced out everywhere in an empty vacuum; and cancel out each other's effects due to their equidistance from each other; allowing anything without mass to go through completely empty space with no deformation of trajectory at all or going through any warped space-time.
However, mass causes local concentrations and dispersals of gravitons, and that leads to the actual perceived warping of space-time.
There are many possibilities and it's too early to judge.

As for whether it's a field or not.. well first one has to define what a field is exactly. We talk about an electro-magnetic field; as in a region of space time where some force acts upon particles with charge (but not on neutral ones).. in the same manor we also talk about a gravitational field; a region of space time where some force acts upon particles with mass (but not on ones without).

If you want anti-gravity, we already have a force which

Not sure where i am suppose to post this but a true tragedy has happened in Russia.

Blaze devastates Russian academic library

One of Russia's largest academic libraries, which contains millions of unique historical documents, has gone up in flames in Moscow. A part of the building’s roof collapsed before dozens of fire fighters managed to contain the blaze.

http://rt.com/news/228075-moscow-fire-unique-library/

AlfaT8 wrote:Not sure where i am suppose to post this but a true tragedy has happened in Russia.  

Blaze devastates Russian academic library

One of Russia's largest academic libraries, which contains millions of unique historical documents, has gone up in flames in Moscow. A part of the building’s roof collapsed before dozens of fire fighters managed to contain the blaze.

http://rt.com/news/228075-moscow-fire-unique-library/

This is catastrophic.

I am wondering who was responsible, and why they did it.

I am assuming there are copies, including digital.

Update:

‘Like Chernobyl’: Millions of unique texts feared lost in Moscow library fire.

The massive fire in Russia’s leading academic library may have destroyed some 15 percent of the collection – or roughly two million unique, historic documents. The devastation “resembles Chernobyl,” say academics hoping to save some of the ancient texts.

The blaze – which erupted at around 10 p.m. Moscow time on Friday (7 p.m. GMT), on the third floor of the Academic Institute of Scientific Information on Social Sciences (INION) in Moscow – was fully extinguished at 11:23 p.m. on Saturday, according to the Emergencies Ministry. Firefighters will continue to pour water over some 2,000 square meters of the damaged building until Sunday morning.

The smoking debris of the library “resembles Chernobyl,” said the head of the Russian Academy of Sciences (RAS), Vladimir Fortov, after he inspected the scene on Nakhimovsky Prospect along with INION director Yuri Pivovarov.

“This is a great loss for science. It is the world’s largest depository of this kind, similar, probably, to the Library of Congress. Here we have the materials which cannot be found elsewhere, and all humanitarian institutions used this library,” Fortov said, as quoted by TASS.

Earlier, the head of RAS estimated that the fire might have affected 15 percent of the library collection, or roughly two million books and texts.

The director of INION called the incident a “tragedy,” as only a small part of the material had digital copies. Luckily, most of the books are stored in the basement and on the first floor of the building – and since the fire started on the third floor, firefighters managed to contain it before the blaze reached the storerooms.

Many of the texts were still damaged by the water, but Pivovarov says there is a good chance they can be saved.

“After the water damage, thanks to modern technology, it is possible to save the books. But after the fire...We cannot turn ashes back into paper,” said the academician. Pivovarov added that the international scientific community has already voiced its desire to help.
http://rt.com/news/228287-moscow-fire-library-destroyed/

Well, their fault for not backing up data. Let this be a warning to them.

sepheronx wrote:Well, their fault for not backing up data.  Let this be a warning to them.

Well i think it is quite a challange to make digital copies of millions of books, not counting that they maybe need to ask for some more recent books if they are allowed to do so, idk, but it is a tragedy, since lot of history can be lost in that way.

Werewolf wrote:

sepheronx wrote:Well, their fault for not backing up data.  Let this be a warning to them.

Well i think it is quite a challange to make digital copies of millions of books, not counting that they maybe need to ask for some more recent books if they are allowed to do so, idk, but it is a tragedy, since lot of history can be lost in that way.

Exactly... It isn't like they can just copy the books and documents using a the scanner on a printer... It is more complex than that. 

Arguably this shows that such "valuable" books/documents shouldn't be stored in such an environment as this one. Have them is different locations so that if let's say one lights on fire, the others are still intact. Could even be in the same campus...

Werewolf wrote:

sepheronx wrote:Well, their fault for not backing up data.  Let this be a warning to them.

Well i think it is quite a challange to make digital copies of millions of books, not counting that they maybe need to ask for some more recent books if they are allowed to do so, idk, but it is a tragedy, since lot of history can be lost in that way.

well, we have the technology, theres like a robot that flips a book on its own and photographs it- its quite fast! then some software just "flattens" the page images and voila! instant ebook. only problem is with old moldy tomes, those may require a bit more delicacy in handling but they are few in between anyway.