Abstract
The First Congress of Russian physicists took place in Leningrad (called Petrograd at the time) in 1920. It laid the foundation for the subsequent congresses of physicists that took place almost every year. Before the war all-Russian congresses of natural scientists (and medical doctors) followed a German model; and each of them became an important event in the history of Russian science.
TN: Translated from Pod Znamenem Marksizma (Under the Banner of Marxism), 1927, No. 1. Cited by Joravsky (2019, p. 399). TN: On Egorshin see Appendix.
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Notes
- 1.
TN: On Joffe see Appendix.
- 2.
TN: For biographical notes on scientists referred to here see Appendix.
- 3.
see Appendix.
- 4.
TN: Lebedinsky is referring to the famous physicist (the first to prove the existence of radio waves) Heinrich Hertz (1857–1894). Lenin in Materialism and Empirio-criticism, Lenin (1977, p. 284) is pleased to note that Hertz, unlike many physicists of that time, does not agree with basing his exposition of mechanics on the theory of energy. See Hertz (1956, pp. 14–24). According to Lenin this demonstrates that it never occurs to Hertz to take a non-materialist “energetics” approach unlike the so-called Empirio-critics that Lenin is opposing. It is perhaps stretching things to claim, with Lebedinsky, that Hertz has a “monistic idea of inherence of energy in matter”, but it is true that he thought that potential energy from a “different standpoint” could be conceived as kinetic energy—see Hertz (1956, p. 227).
- 5.
TN: Materialism and Empirio-criticism, Lenin (1977, pp. 270–273). Lenin notes that the great German chemist Wilhelm Ostwald (1853–1932) sometimes created philosophical confusion by using the term “energy” to avoid taking a materialist standpoint. Lenin insisted that “energy ...means material motion” (p. 272). The phrase “quality of moving matter” is an addition of the authors.
- 6.
- 7.
TN: The quantum theory of optics, or more generally quantum electrodynamics (QED), was only just beginning at the time of this conference. Its formative development (1927–1930) was due to Werner Heisenberg, Pascual Jordan, Wolfgang Pauli, Paul Dirac, and others. For a popular introduction see Feynman (1983).
- 8.
TN: The “vast number of problems” with Bohr’s theory are given in technical detail in Mehra and Rechenberg (1982).
- 9.
TN: In Materialism and Empirio-criticism, Lenin (1977, p. 313), Lenin wrote: “Modern physics is in travail; it is giving birth to dialectical materialism. The process of child-birth is painful”.
- 10.
- 11.
BH and VE: “Not” is in italics in the original.
- 12.
BH and VE Heisenberg (1926, p. 990).
- 13.
TN: Bohr uses the term “rational quantum mechanics” in the last section of the above reference in relation to the new theory he attributes to Heisenberg. This is probably what the authors are referring to but Bohr apparently regarded the latest version of the quantum theory at each stage, even prior to 1925, as attempting a “rational” generalisation of classical mechanics. See Bokulich and Bokulich (2005).
- 14.
TN: Roger Joseph Boscovich (1711–1787), well-known in the history of science, was a Roman Catholic priest, originally from Dubrovnic, who studied in France and Italy. He was proficient in the science and mathematics of his day and highly creative. He developed an atomic theory, intended to explain physical phenomena, where the atoms were points with no extension and where the force between them could be attractive or repulsive, varying with distance. This approach gained some adherents in the eighteenth and nineteenth century.
References
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Hessen, B., Egorshin, V. (2021). The Fifth Congress of Russian Physicists. In: Talbot, C., Pattison, O. (eds) Boris Hessen: Physics and Philosophy in the Soviet Union, 1927–1931. History of Physics. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-70045-4_2
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