4 ms·

But there's also a place for big science. Manhattan project, Apollo program, Soviet industrialization.

• confluence 14y ago
  No doubt. But looking at light through slits, firing atoms through foil, falling apples and making tiny sparks using dynamos made those all possible. You'll also notice those were all government funded defense programs - and are hence a special case with the final one not being effective.
  • netcan 14y ago
    I wouldn't dismiss the final one so off-handedly. The Soviet economy may have been pretty unimpressive by the 70-80s, but earlier on it was making fast progress, not completely unlike the progress of the Chinese economy of the past 20 years. Russia started from a pretty low starting point when Lenin took over.
    • confluence 14y ago
      > Russia started from a pretty low starting point when Lenin took over. That's why they were making fast progress - any idiot who doesn't work will increase performance 100% by getting a job. Just because you take hundreds of millions of people that aren't working and starving to death to working and still starving to death - doesn't mean you did anything particularly useful. It just means you really fucked things up. China's real growth began with capitalist reform. So did Russias.
      • marshallp 14y ago
        Your argument doesn't really make sense though. Nonworking -> working can describe early soviet industrialization, but it was far more impressive than you're making out - they were first in space for everything up till 69. Also, going from the everyday puddling to big science projects can also be described as nonworking->working. If government taxes landowners more thoroughly and invests in big science instead, you can consider that as nw->w.