Science: Watch Your Quantum Theory

Russian scientists, like Russian artists, must toe the party line. Soviet biologists who disagree with the scientifically naive theories of T. D. Lysenko, Communism's pet geneticist, run the risk of being "disciplined." The penalty for arguing is demotion, imprisonment or worse (TIME, Sept. 6). Economists and statisticians who have deviated from the official line have also suffered. But until recently, Russian physicists were left alone. The Soviet Union, struggling desperately to make an atomic bomb, needed all its physicists.

Last week the physicists were herded into line too. The Literary Gazette published two loud blasts against leading Russian physicists. Professor Y. I. Frenkel, author of a book on atomic energy, was accused of "promulgating the quantum theory in the disguise of Marxist dialectical robes." Professors M. Markov and V. Svidersky were denounced for "idealistic and formalistic" conceptions in atomic theory which are "nothing but conceptions admitting the existence of a limit to knowledge."

The Gazette called on true-red Soviet physicists to "rescue the quantum theory from the mire into which physicists and idealists of all shades and colors have driven it." The "latest gigantic achievements of physics in the domain of liberating atomic energy and the study of cosmic rays," trumpeted the Gazette, "have been made not because of, but in spite of current theory."

How could Soviet physicists avoid such denunciation? The way was clear. In Ogonek (Little Flame), Professor Sergei Ivanovich Vavilov, president of the Soviet Academy of Sciences, explained: "A Soviet scientist considers any successful work as impossible, in any field of knowledge, without a thorough mastery of the laws of dialectical materialism." Professor Vavilov is something of an authority on such matters. His brother Nikolai, a famous Russian geneticist and an opponent of Lysenko, disappeared mysteriously about 1942 and is believed to have died in a concentration camp.