“More is Different,” or the “Transition from Quantity to Quality”

Soviet science planners did not recognize the concept of “pure science,” promoting instead the idea that every science worthy of this name should be practically relevant. Their Marxist approach was also consistently non-reductionist, rejecting, for example, eugenicists’ claims to explain social phenomena via biological laws. These general principles also affected the development of new branches within physics, such as physics of metals, condensed matter physics, radiophysics, many-body quantum theory, and non-linear mechanics. This paper will describe some of the pioneering Soviet works in these fields, their position within other subdisciplines of physics, and the new conceptual vocabulary and methods they introduced.