Universal History Annotation << Back NON-FORMAL TRADITIONS OF THE MSU PHYSICAL DEPARTMENT S.K. Kovaleva At the end 1950’s – at the early 1960’s, physicists from MSU have been informal leaders time «the sixties». This was a private refl ection of the well-known, almost folkloric dilemma of those years - the «physics-poetry» or «something physics in high esteem ...». Physicists have been a sign of the time. For physicists considered with special reverence, they worshiped and ranked as the people involved in the principal mysteries of Nature. Priority at that time was the research of the atom and the universe. The explosion of the Soviet atomic bomb in August 1949 led to the realization of the special role of the Soviet physicists in the world physics community. E-mail: sve-kovalyova@yandex.ru рр: 2-13