).
Boris Gryzlov doesn’t only support Petrik in his inventive work, but also defends him towards scientists. The words our speaker said at one of the innovation conferences at the end of last month are probably the brightest political event of the recent weeks. “Unfortunately, many initiatives face obstacles in the form of the Russian Academy of Sciences or bureaucracy, Gryzlov said. I even know there is an Anti-Pseudoscience Committee at RAS. This really makes me wonder: how can they take responsibility and determine what pseudoscience is and what it is not? This is a kind of obscurantism”.
It is worth noting that this “obscurant” Committee was created by the Nobel Prize winner Vitaly Ginzburg to fight numerous fake scientists who appeared after the collapse of the Soviet Union. Its present-day chairman, physicist Eduard Krugliakov, does his best to resist fake science in Russia. The Committee doesn’t have any means to prevent pseudoscientific activities, but it criticizes research and projects they consider pseudoscientific, and produces a regular bulletin “In defense of science”.
“I don’t think we should go back to the Middle Ages and create an inquisition,” Boris Gryzlov also said at the same day. Instead he probably implies it’s better to just try and give taxpayers’ money to Victor Petrik. Who, among other things, claims to have invented eternal batteries that take energy from the environment, ways to create precious stones, has discovered the secret of Stradivary violins, and so on. Another interesting thing is that, according to his official biography, Petrik was charged with fraud, blackmail, attempted robbery, etc. in the year 1984, and stayed in prison until 1989.
When trying to understand why something like this would happen in Russia it’s probably worth to remember Victor Petrik’s words that he said at the XXI International Economic Forum in St. Petersburg in June 2008, referring to his inventions: “Don’t try to understand anything! It’s impossible to understand! As soon as you try to use knowledge, you’ll misfire… you’ll fail!”
Karina Nazaretyan
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