Errors, errors and errors

The iron horse carries forward
Stories gallop up,
Carrying a working family
Identify errors.
"Golden calf"

Each of us knows a certain number of our own and other people’s mistakes, acquaintance with which begins somewhere already in school and continues to expand throughout our future lives. Some even say that you can learn from mistakes (see, for example, Wikipedia - “Error”). Obviously, learning from mistakes is only possible if you have information about them. It was this circumstance that served as one of the main reasons for the appearance of these notes.

The number and nature of errors or misunderstandings that arise, as well as the attitude towards them, can serve as expressive criteria for the state and activity of not only an individual, not only individual industries, but also society as a whole.

The erroneous formulation, for example, of the thesis about the inevitability of the victory of communism contributed to the collapse of the practical implementation of this ideology. In fact, why fight for something that will come anyway? “Winter will pass, summer will come - thanks to the party for that!”

Without going further into the depths of political science, we will limit ourselves here to those errors that are associated mainly with science and the scientific community.

Obviously, errors can be very different - in their causes, consequences and scale. Errors, for example, in a school arithmetic test do not have such immediate dramatic consequences as an error in the operational documentation of the Proton rocket with GLONASS satellites, which led to a one and a half ton overflow when refueling the rocket and an accident on December 5, 2010. Based on the results of the investigation into the causes of this accident, errors made in the calculations for refueling the DM-3 upper stage, which led to the failure of the launch of three GLONASS satellites, the vice-president, chief designer for launch vehicles of RSC Energia Vyacheslav Filin and the deputy head of Roscosmos Viktor Remishevsky were fired, and the head of Roscosmos Anatoly Perminov reprimanded.

The examples of errors given below are not as loud in their consequences as the emergency launch of Proton, but they are also quite expressive.

According to media reports, on Friday November 5, 2010 in Bryansk, during the opening ceremony of the “Alley of Cosmonauts” on Gagarin Boulevard, an embarrassment occurred.

According to the REGNUM news agency, the problem was discovered during the unveiling of the bas-relief to Konstantin Eduardovich Tsiolkovsky. The creators of the monument were in such a hurry to unveil that they renamed the “father of astronautics” to “Edward.” Albert Einstein, named “Albert Einstein” for simplicity, was “shared” with him as a neighbor. The company of scientists also included Mikhail Lomonosov and Nikola Tesla, who were not directly related to the development of astronautics.

The representative of the contractor company that performed the work honestly admitted that he did not know how to spell Albert Einstein's last name.

The opening ceremony of the bas-relief took place in the presence of the governor of the Bryansk region Nikolai Denin, the head of the city Nikolai Patov, and the head of the administration of the regional center Sergei Smirnov. Since the presented bas-relief was made of plaster coated with metallic paint, there remains hope that in the bronze version all spelling and factual errors will be corrected.

Further events in Bryansk developed as follows. On November 11, a message appeared on the website “Our Bryansk.sh” that Governor Nikolai Denin ordered an internal investigation into this fact. A commission specially created for this purpose, headed by Deputy Governor Anatoly Terebunov, found that even at the design stage the customer (MUP Bryanskstroyzakazchik) made a mistake in writing Tsiolkovsky’s initials in the explanatory note. Also, when fulfilling the order, the contractor made mistakes during the production of a plaster copy of the sculptural composition. In addition, the commission revealed a lack of control on the part of the Bryansk city administration over the execution of the order, as well as a violation of the procedure for accepting completed work. The administration of the city of Bryansk took disciplinary measures against a number of officials.

But the city of Bryansk is not all of Russia. In December 2010, such a “lack of control” over the spelling of names and surnames of famous scientists manifested itself not just in a regional city, but in the capital of the Russian Federation, and not just anywhere, but in the temple of the most fundamental science - the Russian Academy Sci. On December 14, at the scientific session of the General Meeting of the Russian Academy of Sciences “Lasers: 50 years in science, technology and medicine”, President of the Russian Academy of Sciences, Academician Yu.S. Osipov delivered an opening speech, the text of which was promptly posted on the RAS ras.ru. website The original version of this text ( www.scientific.ru/dforum/scilife/1293018683 ), which was displayed on the academic website for a week, may well be likened to the above-mentioned plaster bas-relief in Bryansk.

In this text, Paul Dirac was named as Collin Diack, Valentin Fabrikant as Valery Kapnyukov, N. Blombergen as B. Kern, and Charles Townes was introduced four times as “Townes” and five times as “Townes.” In the current conditions, even if related to the RAS website, one can probably know nothing about Professor V. Fabrikant and Nobel laureates P. Dirac, N. Blombergen and C. Townes, but in order to transmute the name of Townes so many times and literally every other time - this is already quite cool! Compared to the Bryansk phenomenon, the display of such a text on an academic website is undoubtedly a new fundamental step in this direction.

However, this is not the first time for an academic website, if we take into account its English version, that such “yawning heights” have been taken. On September 18, 2010, the newspaper “Komsomolskaya Pravda” in a note by S. Efimov “Queen group at the Research Institute named after. squirrels. Errors in translation that the whole Internet laughs at" ( www.kp.ru/daily/24560/734631/ ) presented a selection of many anecdotal mistakes in the English section of the RAS website: Squirrel Institute (Squirrel Institute) - instead of the Squirrel Institute, wounds (wounds) - instead of RAS, etc. and so on. On this occasion, S. Efimov, in particular, writes: Probably, to create the English-language section of the Academy of Sciences' representation on the Internet, the developers used an automatic translator. And the worst of them, because, for example, the translation service from the popular search engine Google copes with the Belk Institute as it should, without side effects in the form of squirrels.

Why does this anecdote even take place, since every second person in the Academy of Sciences is fluent in one or even several foreign languages? What is the name of that wonderful company that makes the RAS website? Will they find the culprit, what will he say in his defense, and how will he be punished?

An implicit, but quite expressive answer to these September questions was actually given in December in the form of publication on the Russian version of the RAS website of the above-mentioned text of the introductory speech by Yu.S. Osipov. This latest embarrassment could probably have been avoided if the leadership of the Russian Academy of Sciences had reacted to the first of them in approximately the same way as was done on the “Our Bryansk” website. However, unlike the Bryansk governor, for some reason the academic leadership was unable to pay the necessary attention to the state of the RAS website, which is, among other things, an electronic showcase of the academy, accessible in modern conditions to an unlimited number of people and forming a very definite idea of ​​​​the main organization Russian fundamental science.

Much can be learned by comparison. At V.V. Vereshchagin there are two paintings similar in composition, depicting the doors of Timur and the doors of the temple. There is hardly any need to explain which of these pictures is more suitable to describe the state to which the RAS website sometimes reaches.

The problems of the Academy are not limited, of course, to the repeated appearance of anecdotal mistakes on its website. These errors, which directly indicate specific organizational failures, are at the same time symptoms of serious internal troubles in the RAS, which turns out to be organizationally incapable of promptly and adequately solving its internal problems.

In May 2010, at the General Meeting of the Russian Academy of Sciences, an appeal from the Division of Physical Sciences was announced, containing criticism of the Presidium of the Russian Academy of Sciences ( TrV No. 54 ). For eight months now, this appeal has remained a voice crying in the wilderness...

In accordance with the above definition of “error,” the academic reaction to the problem of transparency (“transparent whirlpool”) and other nuances in academic procurement of expensive imported equipment can hardly be considered error-free at the moment (see, for example, TrV No. 43 , 45 , 47 , 49 , 51 , 52 , 63 , 67 , 68 ). And the fact that I.L. On October 25, 2010, Bronevoy was not allowed to attend a meeting of the academic commission specially created to consider his appeal addressed to the President of the Russian Federation, which is an elementary gross violation of the norms of ethics, democracy and transparency.

A typical example of an academic attitude towards errors can also be the reaction of the journal “Uspekhi Fizicheskikh Nauk” to the following letter sent to this journal on December 14, 2009 by V.P. Makarova, A.A. Rukhadze and A.A. Samokhina:

In the December 2009 issue of UFN, in paragraph 2 of the “Physics News” section on the Internet with reference to the work of Phys. Rev. Lett. 103 194801 (2009) states: “As predicted in 1967 by V.G. Veselago (see UFN 92 517 (1967)), in “left-handed” matter the cone of radiation and the flow of energy are directed backward with respect to the motion of the particle.”

This statement is not true. In fact, the reversed Vavilov-Cherenkov effect was predicted by graduate student V.L. Ginzburg - V.E. Pafomov in JETP 32 366 (1957) and 36 1853 (1959), and the latter of them, by the way, in the above-mentioned article by V.G. Veselago link is available. Recently, cases of inadequate citation of this kind in domestic and foreign literature have, unfortunately, been encountered too often.

The editor-in-chief of UFN, thanking the authors for their caring attitude towards publications in the UFN journal, concluded his response dated January 14, 2010 as follows:

“Thus, from a formal point of view, you have come to the wrong address: an erroneous (from your point of view) citation was given in the journal Phys. Rev. Lett., where you could probably send your letter.

Thus, we see no reason for publishing your note in the UFN journal.”

One of the reasons for this attitude of the editor-in-chief to errors that grossly distort the content of the work published in this journal may be concern for maintaining its rating, including through inadequate citations. The scale and nature of this inadequate citation can be found, for example, in the journal “Applied Physics” No. 5, (2010), 5-18.

As already noted in TRV Nos. 53 and 55 , the RAS workers' union suffers from many of the same shortcomings as the RAS. Including in relation to the mistakes made in the printed trade union body “Scientific Community”, which I also somehow don’t want to correct. To clarify the reasons for the appearance of a typo in No. 5 “NS” 2010, which I drew attention to even before its paper materialization, the presidium of the Moscow regional organization PR RAS, after my repeated written statements at its meeting on December 1, 2010, created a special commission. The activities of this commission, like the commission created at the meeting of the Council on October 20, 2010 of the RAS PR on the issue of purchasing expensive imported equipment, have not yet brought concrete results.

Let us emphasize in conclusion that the essence of the problem identified here lies not so much in specific sets of errors that have “crept in” here or there, but in the system, in the conditions in which they arise. All types of errors related to science, erroneous actions, together with the causes that give rise to them, must constantly remain within the attention of the entire scientific community.

Happy New Year, working gentlemen!

Alexander Samokhin