Address to Alumni from the Non Canonical Phystech Website

Oxana and Nastya - we remember!

Three years ago Dima and Oxana Lavrov were gassed by KGB in the Nord Ost incident. Dima died as did 130 of the 800 poisoned hostages. All the terrorists were mortified not to stand investigation, trial and punishment by law.

"No negociations, no peace in Chechnya" is still the principle of the Russian government.

The brutal terror of Moscow government generates the equivalent brutal reaction of terrorism. This is like the law of Physics.

The KGB generals who engineered the attack on the hostages and terrorists were secretly awarded the highest state decorations. Secretly - because they are ashamed of what they have done?

A good documentary of the Moscow Siege has just been shown on the Discovery Channel.

In the latter days Phystech is very frequently mentioned in discussions dedicated to development of high school and university education in Russia. Here is a transcript of one more broadcast of Radio Liberty (Svoboda) with participation of Alexei Vasiliev.

"... the educational community is discussing the question: Is there a university in Russia that stands on the level of a good European university? Some say, Phystech! The other say, Phystech is not what it used to be anymore ... "

A funny discussion of the higher education in Russia

On the Reform of Organization of Science in Russia

A pretty decent description of the situation with science and research in Russia (in Russian)

The Soviet System of Education Wins!

An interesting description of Phystech by Marina Galushkina with a discussion (in Russian)
The only thing I could not understand was over whom the Soviet system has won.

Sasha Silberman (Class 1969) on Teaching Physics
in Russian Hign School
on Radio Liberty

A very good understanding of the school education and a very rare, from a Russian, appreciation of the American system of education.

Although, addressing many mid-level problems, the discusion ommits the fundamental question: WHY? What is the purpose of education? As G. K. Chesterton said, "The problem is not that people do not see the solution. The problem is that people do not see the problem"

A movie about the victims of the Moscow Apartment Blocks Blast:
We Don't Trust This Government (Недоверие)
The suspects in the crime cannot investigate that crime!

(200 MB, good quality)

On Rating of the Russian Universities

The non-government sociological research agency RateER reports the Moscow State University, this Harvard of Russia, is losing its leading position to the Bauman Technical University.

The average salaries of the graduates are highest for the Moscow Institute of Foreign Relations (quite naturally!) and the Financial Academy of the Russian Government (very expectedly). Then follow Phystech, Plekhanov Economic Academy and the Bauman University. Moscow State is rated 9th.

The Vladimir Potanin Foundation makes its own independant rating for the fifth year in the row. Its major criterion is the intellectual and personal potential of the students (whatever it is). The leader here is the Voronezh State University . Then follow South Urals State, Fareast State, Tomsk State and Phystech. Moscow State and Moscow Institute of Foreign Relations are not listed among the leaders.

Alexander Z. Patashinski identified an unexpected "self-similarity" of energy fluctuations at different scales, and tried to calculate critical exponents.

He studied a the Moscow Institute of Physics and Technology School of General and Applied Physics, graduated in 1960. Subsequently, Patashinski pursued graduate studies in high energy physics at the Institute for Theoretical and Experimental Physics, under guidance from Lev Landau. Patashinski defended his dissertation thesis in 1963. Following Landau’s lead, Patashinski and his collaborators labored to explain quasi-classical scattering in three dimensions. They investigated how mean field theory breaks down near the point of a phase transition. In 1963 and ‘64, with Valery Pokrovsky, Patashinskii, demonstrated that to describe a phase transition one needs the full set of correlation functions (in later terms, that there is no sorting procedure by which to isolate a main contribution to a partition function from Feynman-Matsubara diagrams), because all graphs are of the same order and therefore all must be added together. They claimed a self-similarity of fluctuations at different scales. This result constituted a violation of the thermodynamic theory of fluctuations. Their complicated arguments were met with immediate opposition from Alexei Abrikosov, and others. They had also tried to calculate critical exponents ("indices"). Their first scaling solution would be correct in supersymmetric theories but not in normal field theory. In 1964 they also conjectured that a phase transition in a superconductor is equivalent to that of a Bose-fluid. In 1965, Patashinskii and Pokrovsky presented phenomenological connections between correlation functions and scaling exponents. They identified analogies between field theory and the description of phase transitions, trying to ascertain anomalous dimensions. They clearly stated that certain correlation functions are scale invariant. Like Kadanoff and Benjamin Widom, independently, Pokrovsky and Patashinskii generalized the theory of scaling though leaving critical indices undetermined. In 1968 Patashinski defended his Doctor of Science dissertation on scaling. He subsequently worked on the theory of turbulence and other subjects. In 1983, together with Valery Pokrovsly, he was awarded the prestigious Landau Prize.

Alexander Z. Patashinski is Research Professor at the Materials Research Center of Northwestern University, in Evanston, Illinois. He was a longtime senior staff member at the Budker Nuclear Physics Institute in Novosibirsk.

September 9, 2003, Edward Teller passed away in Stanford, CA.

He was born in 1908 in Hungary

It has been insinuated that George "Dzhonny" Gamow who was very close to Teller assisted Beria and Sakharov in creating the Soviet H-bomb

Teller -- Gamow -- Sakharov

We are planning to distribute Phystech memorabilia for our alums - bumper stickers, rear window decals, tee-shirts, caps, and coffee mugs

Those who are interested please contact Vlad Olchanski

25 years ago, on May 15, 1978 a Moscow Cangaroo Court started the trial of our alumnus, Yuri Orlov who was a leader of the Moscow Helsinki Human Right Watch Group. Yuri received 7 years of labor camp with subsequent 5 years of excile - the maximum

100 year ago, on April 25, 1903 Professor A. Kolmogorov was born.

He was the founder of the modern theory of probabilities

Killed in the September 1999 apartment complexes bombings in Moscow

Alexei "Slash" Taletski, from Belgorod, came to the Phystech School of Management and Applied Mathematics (FUPM) in 1995.

He played bass guitar in the Vereteno group (progressive rock)
To listen the music you must have a Russian IP address or use a Russian based proxy -- there is a song about the fate of the Kursk submarine.(8 MB)
More Vereteno music downloadable as MP3 is here.

Thanks to Max Kulibaba and Maria Talachova for help in finding the information

There were more Phystech victims in that September bombings. Do you know of them?

Whodunit is still a mistery very few in Russia care to find out.
an English language description of the KGB exploits with Hexogen in Ryazan -- a third possible large apartment block bombing

The recently organized FOPF Alumni Association and Fund are now gathering donations for our first project:
buying laundry equipment to be installed in the Dorm #6 (obschezhitie FOPF).

We sincerely welcome all your ideas and contributions. More information can be found here: <url:http://www.alumni.caltech.edu/~natalia/phystech/proekt_1.htm>

When you were a kid, you were scared with reading the Brothers Grimm tales.
When you grew up, you read horrifying Mario Puzo's The Godfather (or saw the movie)
Yet these are for kids or teenagers.
If you want to read something truly hair raising, read Yuli Dubov's Большая пайка , The Big Meal for the Hungry describing how Soviet scientists turned into Russian businessmen, a true story based on one of the Phystech's base departments. The novel is now shot as a motion picture, The Oligarch, by the same director that did the Bratelli movies. I did my MS and PhD then worked in this institute and was fortunate not to have hit that road all the way.

On the sponsor of the Phystech Department at the Institute of Control Sciences,
Professor Boris Berezovsky

A Submariner Whacks 10,000 "Krauts" in One Ship (in Russian),
2,000 women and 3,000 children included
(An English translation of a survivor's letter).

Gorbachev awarded LtCmdr. Marinesko the Hero of the USSR Title in 1990, posthumously. A monument to the "hero" was erected in 1990s in Woody-Allen City, Russia (formerly, Koenigsberg, East Prussia)