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NancyLebovitz comments on Open thread for December 9 - 16, 2013 - Less Wrong Discussion
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The Body Electric mentioned that the Soviets were ahead of the west in studying electrical fields in biology because (not sure of the date-- sometime before the seventies) electricity sounded to much like elan vital to the westerners.
Which Body Electric? I don't see it in Becker and Selden, but maybe I don't know what to look for.
Possibly this Body Electric. It's at least about the right subject, but I'd have swore I'd read it much earlier than 1998, and my copy (buried somewhere) probably had a purple cover.
The cover on the hardcover looks more familiar, and at least it's from 1985.
Wikipedia makes it sound like the right book.
Where were you searching? You had the authors right.
I looked at that book on google books. I searched for "Soviet," "elan," etc, and did not see the story you mentioned.
Added: Amazon says that the book uses these words a lot more than google says, but I didn't look at many hits.
That's interesting. I read your comment out of context and didn't know you were making a comment about the language. I agreed that I don't like thinking about electricity in animals (or more strongly, any coordinated magnetic phenomena, etc) because of this association. There is a similarity in the sounds, ("electrical" and "elan vital") but also the concepts are close in space ... perhaps the Soviets lacked this ugh field altogether.
I was using "sounded like" metaphorically. I assume they knew the difference in meaning, but were affected by the similarity of concepts and worry about their reputations.
I guessed that the Soviets were more willing to do the research because Marxism was kind of like weird science, so they were willing to look into weird science in general. However, this is just a guess. A more general hypothesis is that new institutions are more willing to try new things.