M-Lom

There’s a video circulating on twitter in which historian Sarah Paine can’t name a single Russian product. That’s a pretty astonishing display of ignorance. The contribution of scientists and engineers from the Russian Empire and the USSR to modern technological civilization has been enormous. Just think of Soviet physicist Zhores Alferov, whose pioneering work on semiconductor heterostructures helped lay the technological foundations for modern fiber-optic communications. But what interests me is something else. When you study the biographies of great 20th-century scientists, you often discover that they or their parents came from the Russian Empire or the USSR. Many of these scientists were educated there, began their scientific careers, and then emigrated. In other words, it’s hard to think of another country that has exported so much intellectual talent.