Transistor - Because of the denial of Principle of Uncertainty and Quantum Theory, no transistors were made in the U.S. S. R. for a decade after transistor was invented in the United States. By 1960 transistors generally replaced vacuum tubes in the West, but Soviets simply proceeded to use vacuum tubes in their electronics. For example, the pride of Soviet military, MIG 21 fighter, used in Vietnam, still had many of its electronics based on vacuum tubes. MIG 21 simply could not outshoot the transistorized American fighters. This Soviet transistor debacle was compared by professor Emilio Segre, then chairman of the physics department at the University of California in Berkeley and also an expert on Galileo, to the setback for Italy when Vatican refused to accept Galileo's proofs that the Earth moves around the Sun. The Vatican decree ensured that this knowledge had to move out of Italy. It found freedom in England where Newton continued the work of Galileo, defined the Newtonian Mechanics and with it the fundamentals of physics that gave birth to technology in England and France. But Italy took a back seat in sciences for a couple of centuries.
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