🚀 go-pugleaf

In article <1992Aug26.023245.11738@ccu1.aukuni.ac.nz>, ecmtwhk@ccu1.aukuni.ac.nz
(Thomas Koenig) says:
>
>I recently heard from a friend that some universities in what used to be
>the Eastern block did not teach the second law of thermodynamics to
>their students, because that was seen to collide with Marxist philosophy
>that the world was going to perfection, and was therefore politically
>incorrect to the highest degree. He also mentioned that Goedel's theorem
>was taught to be fallacious, for the same reason. Is this true?
>--
>Thomas Koenig, ecmtwhk@ccu1.aukuni.ac.nz, ib09@rz.uni-karlsruhe.de
>The joy of engineering is to find a straight line on a double logarithmic
>diagram.
This is a piece of x-Eastern Europe folklore.  I'm not sure about Goedel's
theorem (most of stuff we were tought was renamed after some russian guy -
"Russia is the motherland of elephants" (quote from something famous in
Russia, don't remember what, sorry), and also it all was pretty long ago
:-( ), but the rumor you heard is not true.  Such things happened all
to often in '40s-'50s: "Cybernetics is a burgeous anti-science",
"Weismanism-Morganism (for genetics) is a capitalistic whore" (translation
from Russian and all awkwardness of it is mine:).  In '60s and later the
trend became more subtle: they didn't drop or forbid ideas which apparently
contradicted marxist ideology; in an exercise of double-talk they "proved"
that there is no contradiction or that "marxist philosophy" dealed with
higher-plane ideas than mere physics, so any contradiction was deemed
apparent only.

Alex "But I finished 3 years at MFTI" Pechtchanski
P.S.  I just recalled that my son, who studied for a year in one of the
Moscow universities quite recently, was not tought anything funny (like
"no 2-nd law" etc.)