Berichte zur Wissenschaftsgeschichte, EarlyView.

Ideological considerations have always influenced science, butrarely as directly and massively as in the Soviet Union during the early Cold War period, when cosmology was among the sciences that became politicized. This field of science developed very differently in the Communist countries than in the West, in large measure because of political pressure. Certain cosmological models, in particular of the big bang type, were declared pseudo-scientific and idealistic because they implied a cosmic creation, a concept which was taken to be (...) religious. The result of the ideological pressure was not an independent Soviet cosmology, but that astronomers and physicists abandoned cosmological research in the Western sense. Onlyin the 1960s did this situation change, and cosmology in the Soviet Union began to flourish. The paper reviews the relationship between cosmology and political ideology in the Soviet Union from about 1947 to 1963, and it briefly relates this case to the later one in the People’s Republic of China. (shrink)

At the height of the Cold War, in the 1950s, the process of parallel invention of masers and lasers took place on the opposing sides of the Iron Curtain. While the American part of the story has been investigated by historians in much penetrating detail, comparable Soviet developments were described more superficially. This study aims at, to some extent, repairing this discrepancy by analyzing the Soviet path towards the maser from a comparative angle. It identifies, on the one hand, significant (...) differences between the two projects regarding their heuristics, the relationship between theory and experiment, grounding in different academic cultures, and the resulting conceptualization of the maser principle. At the same time, the case also illustrates more fundamental transformations in the practices of postwar research that can be characterized as a convergence between the Soviet and the American science of the period. (shrink)

ABSTRACT Twenty years after the fall of the Berlin Wall, the Cold War looks ever more like a slice of history rather than a contemporary reality. During those same twenty years, scholarship on science, technology, and the state during the Cold War era has expanded dramatically. Building on major studies of physics in the American context—often couched in terms of “big science”—recent work has broached scientific efforts in other domains as well, scrutinizing Cold War scholarship in increasingly international and comparative (...) frameworks. The essays in this Focus section take stock of current thinking about science and the Cold War, revisiting the question of how best to understand tangled (and sometimes surprising) relationships between government patronage and the world of ideas. (shrink)