The Kolmogorov Option
In his best-selling Chinese sci-fi novel (also translated into English), Three Body Problem , Cixin Liu starts with events during the Chinese Revolution. Science got mixed with ideology, as one character in the book laments: “You changed the names of many physical laws and constants: Ohm’s law you called resistance law, Maxwell’s equations you called electromagnetic equations, Planck’s constant you called the quantum constant.” Why the renaming? “All scientific accomplishments resulted from the wisdom of the working masses, and those capitalist academic authorities only stole those fruits and put their names on them.” One might dismiss all this with a Shakespearian “What’s in a name?” shrug. The problem is that such interference rarely stops with name and credit. Even scientific statements could get you into trouble with the political authorities. Like the Church and communist regimes. Scott Alexander wrote about the Kolmogorov option (or should it be “complicity”...