Documents / FOIA release
This JPRS translation, dated 1 August 1990, is an article from the Soviet journal Kommunist by Leonid Grishchuk of the Shternberg State Astronomy Institute. In it he argues that basic science needs state support. He notes that lecture audiences ask a lot about flying saucers and space aliens. He goes on to review cosmology, including galaxy structure, cosmic expansion, relic radiation, Fridman's models and inflationary theory. He closes by saying the question of non-Earth civilizations is a topic for another author.
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# Concatenated JPRS Reports, 1990 Document 12 of 16 44. The boundaries of the known and the hypothetical, which I have tried to talk about, are very mobile. It is possible that tomorrow they will be different: such are the rates of our renewal of knowledge. 45. It must be said that research on the Universe has always been accompanied by the appearance of questions, going beyond the framework of cosmological science. Let us recall the fate of the Dominican monk Jordano Bruno, burned at the stake by the Inquisition in 1600. The mercilessness of the reprisals against him were not immediately understood. After all, it would seem, the conflict was based on highly abstract ideas about the infinite nature of space and the multiplicity of habitable worlds! It is hard to establish the connection to everyday life. Nevertheless, his opinions undermined established concepts, sanctified by the Church. If the heretic was not condemned, doubts would arise not only in the accepted picture of the world, but also in the infallibility of the Church and power. 46. This tragic page of history illustrates the sharp world-outlook and ideological struggle surrounding cosmological assertions, also occurring in our time, for instance, surrounding the question of the causes of a singular state (is this the work of God?). Man began to think about the origin of the world long ago. The images from the material culture of primitive societies attest to this. 47. Mankind has been living in the space age, started by the flight of Yu. Gagarin, for almost 30 years. We are seeing farther and we know more, we are approaching a fundamentally new understanding of the Universe that is now facing the ''world of men.'' Researching it requires the participation of representatives of almost all sciences, including humanitarians. It is a question both of ensuring space flights, as well as of resolving a whole number of fundamental problems, for instance, the problem of the existence of non-Earth civilizations. Certain experience in interaction and some practical scientific experience has accumulated here. However, this is a topic for yet another author. 48. COPYRIGHT: Izdatelstvo TsK KPSS ''Pravda'' , ''Kommunist'' , 1990.
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FOIA release, from the cia-readingroom collection. The PDF is mirrored here; the original link is above. The text was read from the page images by GLM-OCR; expect the odd misread word. 12 pages are in the text index: search them above, or from the library's search.