Sunday, October 16, 2022

Science, Show Business and Hollywood

 Science, Show Business and Hollywood

If you go back in time to 19th and then early 20th century, the science was made by very few people. Normally they had funds for their work (e.g., from a benevolent monarch )  and the money was never an issue. Neither was it a problem to have your work made visible. Many of them preferred not to publish, or published in obscure journals. Thus, the groundbreaking work of J.W.Gibbs was published in an obscure scientific journal, which did not prevent him from becoming the seminal scientist in the field of thermodynamics and statistical mechanics. I do not remember how exactly he, an American, which was not the place to make science at the time, became known; I vaguely recall, Maxwell was involved. 

The other little piece of information is: very few people enjoy and are capable of making 'true science' . There are many adjacent fields the require more people of less esoteric skills, such as the technology, business, education etc.

Fast forward to modern times and we are in a completely different world. We have so many people around the scientific fields, claiming to do science, or at least doing it as a part  of what they are supposed to do, as university professors etc.  The new challenges are: to be noticed, to be funded, etc.  

Therefore the motto is: become visible, make yourself known, self-promote etc.

These problems have existed in show business already for a long time, and scientist are happy to learn from Hollywood.

As we know, creating a good plot, a good story for a movie is difficult.  We are out of good stories, everything has been done already. Therefore, we have re-runs: the movie that has been done before is re-made with new actors. I have seen some analogies in science what an old study of 1950 is repeated again, with, or without proper credits.

As we have heard, there are more movies made in India than in the United States.  As nobody is watching movies made in India outside the home country, one perhaps can do a Hollywood version of an Indian movie, with or without proper credit--- nobody will notice!  Similarly, as American scientists get out of new ideas, they are happy to borrow some from obscure  Russian papers of 1950s, and nobody will notice.



Wednesday, October 12, 2022

Russian-Ukranian war: how does the success look like for Putin?

 As I  learned form my engineering career, before you start doing something major, you need to decide on  this.  Perhaps, a quick war and the political integration Ukraine into Russia was the original plan. Again, all the wrongs of the war, human life lost, long and lasting animosity of Ukrainians towards Russians was considered as a necessary evil. 

As this plan did not work, and the follow-up plan did not work,  the question comes yet again, how does the success look like now?  It will be coming many times,   as no quick resolution is in sight.

Putin

 Regardless the actual ethnicity, is Putin a quintessential Russian character?  Some elements of his character is definitely Russian/Soviet, that is, his overly direct talk, rumblings etc.  that are so politically incorrect and would not be possible in the Western world.  Yet his deadly determination, killer instinct and methodical approach is very Western. Perhaps he learned some of it while on the mission in Eastern Germany. Russian character I know is much more relaxed, disorganized and forgiving. Yet Putin is not like this, he is  well organized and if he wants something he 'stays on task'.

Wednesday, October 5, 2022

Evolution of Russia after the Collapse of the Soviet Union

 With the recent political developments, brutal war and many human  lives lost, the question comes, why did it go this way. Why this way?  Perhaps we need to look back into Russia of 1989, 1990, 1991 - I was still there. So many 'progressive' developments, hopes, aspirations- of course, corruption, chaos and humiliation of the country was already in place. On the other hand, the country also was opening up and was integrating itself in the world. But if somebody in 1989 would have predicted that in 30 some years, Russia and Ukraine will start a brutal, dysfunctional civil war, Syrian -conflict -like?  Well it does not make any sense! Could not be! 

Yet, if you look microscopically, at every 1-2 year timeframe, everything made sense, everything had some sort of continuity. So, it seems that the evolution was controlled by  microscopic laws that made some sense, into the final state that was completely unexpected.

I presume there are some analogies in physics in dynamics of complex systems.