In Skolkovo, a prototyping center was opened, and I went to look at it.
On Friday, at the invitation of a friend, I first visited the very Skolkovo - got on the opening of a new building and made an unexpected opinion about the whole project - I want to share it with you, Habr.
“Prototyping is a risky thing” by Gael Bertrand
At the two-hour speech, the launch of the prototype building was discussed. This is the department that will be engaged in the constant production of prototypes with all the stuffing. The building includes four laboratories: engineering, machining, 3D-prototyping and design bureau.
')
But before I tell you more about them, I want to share my general impression - Skolkovo is a truly outstanding research project in one visit that brought me back faith in Russian science. Let it sound big-minded, but I will now try to explain how I came to such conclusions.
Malevich would be happy to visit here
Why does science flourish in the United States and Europe, but do we have a rather miserable existence? Although in fundamental mathematics or physics, we are still ahead of the rest, but their applied use, such as programming or new electronic technologies, is clearly on the side of the States. What is the catch? In budgets.
Science is insanely expensive and at first glance a useless thing. Compare yourself - spending six billion on a nuclear submarine can still be explained and justified, and when, instead of a submarine, is it proposed to build a disposable scientific instrument to test another crazy theory? And after all, every new step in science adds several zeros to the estimate for the instruments.
I need these!
In 1905, Einstein proved the existence of atoms and turned our understanding of the structure of the world. For this, it took him a few hours of reflection, a room aquarium and a pinch of pollen. The history of science was divided into "before" and "after" this brilliant proof - when looking through a microscope, one could see a constant "Brownian motion" of pollen, which could not be explained in any other way but by the existence of atoms.
Before Einstein, scientists had to make a choice of two main theories — either atoms are a mathematical abstraction or real-life particles of matter. Today, scientists warmly recall these times of simple and understandable physics, because now they have more than two hundred serious theories of the structure of matter and no opportunity to test at least one of them.
1964 The Americans intimidate the USSR with the power of their scientific thought and the first atomic aircraft carrier.
In 2012, the Large Hadron Collider reached its design capacity, and it seems that it has already achieved its main goal - to verify the existence of the Higgs boson. In terms of scale, this task is similar to the Einstein experiment and is its direct continuation, and its solution has become as epochal as the “discovery of the atom”. But it took 27 years to solve the technical problem of the experiment, more than 10,000 scientists from 100 countries and 6 billion dollars only for the construction of engineering structures. But here, the Higgs boson is found. What's next?
The present work is still to be done - about a billion collisions will occur every second at the LHC, each of which will generate dozens of particles of different types. The annual amount of experimental data is estimated at 10 Petabytes - the LHC will provide 1% of the information produced by mankind. To process this data will be a huge number of scientists.
And when the LHC power is exhausted, we will need a new, even more powerful collider - how do scientists turn out such colossal sums for their experiments? Anyone who has agreed on a budget at least once understands that this is not the most trivial task in a project. So they do not beg: the whole thing is that science in the west, attention itself allocates a budget to itself.
That is the secret of its success - university autonomy de facto turns science into the fifth branch of government. The university board takes part in the formation of local and federal budgets and, together with other branches of government, decides how much money will be spent on medicine, defense or, in fact, science. Naturally, for this, pundits are operating on the support of taxpayers - propaganda companies are leading and all the time supporting interest in their activities - remember what hype they have raised around the collider so that its launch would not go unnoticed. In the United States, this process is particularly pronounced: for example, Condoleezza Rice’s political (rather than administrative) career began in 1998 at the Stanford budget allocator, when in two years she turned the university’s twenty-million-year deficit into a fourteen-million surplus.
Alas, I did not find this autograph on the Skolkovo wall - I hope it hangs there in a golden frame :)
The idea of ​​Skolkovo lies precisely in the return of power to scientists - here scientists independently distribute their budgets and decide how the future center of innovations should be. Together, they decided that they needed a prototyping center and thought out its components in detail - it turned out surprisingly clever and productive, and at the presentation, scientists from the audience commented on all investment decisions — to which speakers politely noticed that they were ready to consider options for purchasing any equipment for which there will be applications from Skolkovo residents.
Kapitsa, by the way, also wore a cap, so I here descended on my own :)
I think this is the secret of Skolkovo’s allure - these neat lawns, well-kept parks and pretty buildings. Such a slice of supra-rational Germany in the middle of frustrated Russia. What the hell is not joking, maybe this city of the future also has a big experiment to modernize the country's governance system - they will take the next Duma and introduce educational qualifications, like in Italy at the beginning of the century, so that only proven scientists in the rank not lower than a professor would sit in the deputies?
It’s just completely incomprehensible to me why all this is not covered in any way and even the inhabitants of Habr have no idea what Skolkovo is and what exactly are they doing there? Until last Friday, I was absolutely sure that this whole innovation center was some talentless cut of the budget by moneymakers from the government - until I saw all these young and not very scientists with burning eyes, who were finally given authority over science.
Teasing Julia long hair from a young physicist
Hey, Vekselberg, please give them more time to write about their work on blogs, get a weekly heading on Habré and some unofficial Twitter Skolkovo - sure, like in any scientific team there are a lot of funny things happening every day talk all over Russia. Now even the rover has Twitter, where he jokes about new maps in the iPhone firmware!
NASA updated me on iOS6. Suddenly, I am now in Norway.
Why does Skolkovo do nothing at all in social networks? More precisely, it may be doing something, but it’s some very official hack that no one will read in runet. But public support is the only thing that a scientific project can rely on. Even the collider had to run viral stories about black holes and the end of the world, so that the waste of cyclopean budgets would not cause a negative reaction from the whole world - let's go to Skolkovo, keep it simple and come to us! I hope at least this post will make the Skolkovo leadership move.
But back to my adventures - what did I see with my own eyes as the first blogger (sic!) Who visited the Russian Silicon Valley?
We went with the scientists to the laboratories - it looks like an ordinary office, only with large rooms filled with all kinds of equipment.
The engineering laboratory is a branch of the defense research institute producing electronics for military needs. In the presentation, they showed their Google Glass counterpart for special forces helmets and some devices for military satellites. Residents of Skolkovo will contact them to develop electronics and integrated circuits for their prototypes.
Gather a prototype meteorological satellite.
And here is a discussion of the budget by sector
The presenter happily waves his hand to me - probably he proposes to attract my investments.
Machining offers all possible machines - from Soviet lathes 84th year to the latest French engineering. It’s a pity I forgot to take a presentation from them, and they haven’t uploaded it to the site yet.
Kinekt + laptop - this thing can drive itself to the canteen for pizza?
I was interested in the laboratory of 3D printers most of all - de facto they have a whole workshop of machines for the production of everything, in general, even if only from plastic. As a layman, I was more interested in a German household 3D printer worth less than two thousand euros - in a couple of minutes he printed more than a decent figure.
I want myself the same usb-printer!
I really could not resist and took out the already printed legs from the printer to examine the print quality - as you can see it is more than perfect, the relief and the surface folds were laid in the model - inside it is hollow with a stiffener grid, and between the legs there is a thin web of excess plastic - removed .
A bundle of plastic sticks for a printer costs 800 rubles, 200 grams in it, which is on average 15 prototypes, if you make them hollow inside. The accuracy of the printer is from 0.175 to 0.33 which is enough for the eyes for domestic needs. Simply put, such 3D printers are a bonanza, is it not for you to print pictures on t-shirts - what is it like to present a miniature figurine for your girlfriend's birthday? The cost price is only 50 rubles.
You can even print moving internal parts of any complexity - this key was printed in one pass and works quite well for itself.
But what you do not expect to meet at the research center is the design department. In Skolkovo, all prototypes will pass through the hands of the Smirnov Design studio, as I understood it, the leading industrial design bureau in the country - they specialize exclusively in engineering design. For about thirty minutes, representatives of the studio explained this with the example of already completed projects.
Superchairs, already in the stadiums of the country.
I liked the story of stadium seats made of soft polypropylene most of all - they had the task to make them anti-vandal, self-cleaning and at the same time weighing no more than one and a half kilograms. The task is not so difficult if it were not for the polypropylene itself - it is molded using the pouring method and it gives a very strong weighting. That is, any fold or rib gives a furrow on the opposite side - three months of calculations and voila: a chair was born that turned this flaw into a key design element. Bends, but does not break, cheap but serves for a long time, it is pleasant to sit and it is difficult to soil.
At this moment I was already hungry enough to go on researching Skolkovo catering - but more about that next time!
Bye, Skolkovo!
“Prototyping is a risky thing” by Gael Bertrand
At the two-hour speech, the launch of the prototype building was discussed. This is the department that will be engaged in the constant production of prototypes with all the stuffing. The building includes four laboratories: engineering, machining, 3D-prototyping and design bureau.
')
But before I tell you more about them, I want to share my general impression - Skolkovo is a truly outstanding research project in one visit that brought me back faith in Russian science. Let it sound big-minded, but I will now try to explain how I came to such conclusions.
Malevich would be happy to visit here
Why does science flourish in the United States and Europe, but do we have a rather miserable existence? Although in fundamental mathematics or physics, we are still ahead of the rest, but their applied use, such as programming or new electronic technologies, is clearly on the side of the States. What is the catch? In budgets.
Science is insanely expensive and at first glance a useless thing. Compare yourself - spending six billion on a nuclear submarine can still be explained and justified, and when, instead of a submarine, is it proposed to build a disposable scientific instrument to test another crazy theory? And after all, every new step in science adds several zeros to the estimate for the instruments.
I need these!
In 1905, Einstein proved the existence of atoms and turned our understanding of the structure of the world. For this, it took him a few hours of reflection, a room aquarium and a pinch of pollen. The history of science was divided into "before" and "after" this brilliant proof - when looking through a microscope, one could see a constant "Brownian motion" of pollen, which could not be explained in any other way but by the existence of atoms.
Before Einstein, scientists had to make a choice of two main theories — either atoms are a mathematical abstraction or real-life particles of matter. Today, scientists warmly recall these times of simple and understandable physics, because now they have more than two hundred serious theories of the structure of matter and no opportunity to test at least one of them.
1964 The Americans intimidate the USSR with the power of their scientific thought and the first atomic aircraft carrier.
In 2012, the Large Hadron Collider reached its design capacity, and it seems that it has already achieved its main goal - to verify the existence of the Higgs boson. In terms of scale, this task is similar to the Einstein experiment and is its direct continuation, and its solution has become as epochal as the “discovery of the atom”. But it took 27 years to solve the technical problem of the experiment, more than 10,000 scientists from 100 countries and 6 billion dollars only for the construction of engineering structures. But here, the Higgs boson is found. What's next?
The present work is still to be done - about a billion collisions will occur every second at the LHC, each of which will generate dozens of particles of different types. The annual amount of experimental data is estimated at 10 Petabytes - the LHC will provide 1% of the information produced by mankind. To process this data will be a huge number of scientists.
And when the LHC power is exhausted, we will need a new, even more powerful collider - how do scientists turn out such colossal sums for their experiments? Anyone who has agreed on a budget at least once understands that this is not the most trivial task in a project. So they do not beg: the whole thing is that science in the west, attention itself allocates a budget to itself.
That is the secret of its success - university autonomy de facto turns science into the fifth branch of government. The university board takes part in the formation of local and federal budgets and, together with other branches of government, decides how much money will be spent on medicine, defense or, in fact, science. Naturally, for this, pundits are operating on the support of taxpayers - propaganda companies are leading and all the time supporting interest in their activities - remember what hype they have raised around the collider so that its launch would not go unnoticed. In the United States, this process is particularly pronounced: for example, Condoleezza Rice’s political (rather than administrative) career began in 1998 at the Stanford budget allocator, when in two years she turned the university’s twenty-million-year deficit into a fourteen-million surplus.
Alas, I did not find this autograph on the Skolkovo wall - I hope it hangs there in a golden frame :)
The idea of ​​Skolkovo lies precisely in the return of power to scientists - here scientists independently distribute their budgets and decide how the future center of innovations should be. Together, they decided that they needed a prototyping center and thought out its components in detail - it turned out surprisingly clever and productive, and at the presentation, scientists from the audience commented on all investment decisions — to which speakers politely noticed that they were ready to consider options for purchasing any equipment for which there will be applications from Skolkovo residents.
Kapitsa, by the way, also wore a cap, so I here descended on my own :)
I think this is the secret of Skolkovo’s allure - these neat lawns, well-kept parks and pretty buildings. Such a slice of supra-rational Germany in the middle of frustrated Russia. What the hell is not joking, maybe this city of the future also has a big experiment to modernize the country's governance system - they will take the next Duma and introduce educational qualifications, like in Italy at the beginning of the century, so that only proven scientists in the rank not lower than a professor would sit in the deputies?
It’s just completely incomprehensible to me why all this is not covered in any way and even the inhabitants of Habr have no idea what Skolkovo is and what exactly are they doing there? Until last Friday, I was absolutely sure that this whole innovation center was some talentless cut of the budget by moneymakers from the government - until I saw all these young and not very scientists with burning eyes, who were finally given authority over science.
Teasing Julia long hair from a young physicist
Hey, Vekselberg, please give them more time to write about their work on blogs, get a weekly heading on Habré and some unofficial Twitter Skolkovo - sure, like in any scientific team there are a lot of funny things happening every day talk all over Russia. Now even the rover has Twitter, where he jokes about new maps in the iPhone firmware!
NASA updated me on iOS6. Suddenly, I am now in Norway.
Why does Skolkovo do nothing at all in social networks? More precisely, it may be doing something, but it’s some very official hack that no one will read in runet. But public support is the only thing that a scientific project can rely on. Even the collider had to run viral stories about black holes and the end of the world, so that the waste of cyclopean budgets would not cause a negative reaction from the whole world - let's go to Skolkovo, keep it simple and come to us! I hope at least this post will make the Skolkovo leadership move.
But back to my adventures - what did I see with my own eyes as the first blogger (sic!) Who visited the Russian Silicon Valley?
We went with the scientists to the laboratories - it looks like an ordinary office, only with large rooms filled with all kinds of equipment.
The engineering laboratory is a branch of the defense research institute producing electronics for military needs. In the presentation, they showed their Google Glass counterpart for special forces helmets and some devices for military satellites. Residents of Skolkovo will contact them to develop electronics and integrated circuits for their prototypes.
Gather a prototype meteorological satellite.
And here is a discussion of the budget by sector
The presenter happily waves his hand to me - probably he proposes to attract my investments.
Machining offers all possible machines - from Soviet lathes 84th year to the latest French engineering. It’s a pity I forgot to take a presentation from them, and they haven’t uploaded it to the site yet.
Kinekt + laptop - this thing can drive itself to the canteen for pizza?
I was interested in the laboratory of 3D printers most of all - de facto they have a whole workshop of machines for the production of everything, in general, even if only from plastic. As a layman, I was more interested in a German household 3D printer worth less than two thousand euros - in a couple of minutes he printed more than a decent figure.
I want myself the same usb-printer!
I really could not resist and took out the already printed legs from the printer to examine the print quality - as you can see it is more than perfect, the relief and the surface folds were laid in the model - inside it is hollow with a stiffener grid, and between the legs there is a thin web of excess plastic - removed .
A bundle of plastic sticks for a printer costs 800 rubles, 200 grams in it, which is on average 15 prototypes, if you make them hollow inside. The accuracy of the printer is from 0.175 to 0.33 which is enough for the eyes for domestic needs. Simply put, such 3D printers are a bonanza, is it not for you to print pictures on t-shirts - what is it like to present a miniature figurine for your girlfriend's birthday? The cost price is only 50 rubles.
You can even print moving internal parts of any complexity - this key was printed in one pass and works quite well for itself.
But what you do not expect to meet at the research center is the design department. In Skolkovo, all prototypes will pass through the hands of the Smirnov Design studio, as I understood it, the leading industrial design bureau in the country - they specialize exclusively in engineering design. For about thirty minutes, representatives of the studio explained this with the example of already completed projects.
Superchairs, already in the stadiums of the country.
I liked the story of stadium seats made of soft polypropylene most of all - they had the task to make them anti-vandal, self-cleaning and at the same time weighing no more than one and a half kilograms. The task is not so difficult if it were not for the polypropylene itself - it is molded using the pouring method and it gives a very strong weighting. That is, any fold or rib gives a furrow on the opposite side - three months of calculations and voila: a chair was born that turned this flaw into a key design element. Bends, but does not break, cheap but serves for a long time, it is pleasant to sit and it is difficult to soil.
At this moment I was already hungry enough to go on researching Skolkovo catering - but more about that next time!
Bye, Skolkovo!
Source: https://habr.com/ru/post/153707/
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