Abstract
We published our article on the Fifth Congress of Russian physicists in the first issue of this magazine and signed it H. E.
TN: Translated from Pod Znamenem Marksizma (Under the Banner of Marxism), 1927, Nos. 2–3. Cited by Joravsky (2019), p. 186, n. 360 and Josephson (1991), p. 385, n. 75. TN: For more on Egorshin and Timiryazev see Appendix.
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Notes
- 1.
TN: See Chap. 2.
- 2.
TN: For Dayton Miller see Appendix.
- 3.
TN: Roy J. Kennedy was an American physicist who also carried out experiments relating to the speed of light.
- 4.
TN: On Vavilov see Appendix.
- 5.
BH and VE: Lenin, V. I., “On the question of dialectics”, Pod Znamenem Marksizma (Under the Banner of Marxism) 5–6 (1925): p. 17. TN: English translation taken from Philosophical Notebooks, (Lenin 1976), pp. 360–361.
- 6.
TN: Chap. 5, Sect. 8 in Lenin (1977).
- 7.
TN: For Ernst Mach, see Appendix. Pierre Duhem (1861–1916) was a French theoretical physicist but today is well-known for his contribution to the history and philosophy of science. John Stallo (1823–1900), a German–American intellectual who was an early contributor to the philosophy of science to whom Mach was sympathetic. Lenin attacks Duhem and Stallo, like Mach, for alleged “idealism”. Abel Rey (1873–1940) was a French philosopher and historian of science whose philosophy Lenin denounced as “positivism” but whose summary of the latest developments in physics Lenin studied as being made “carefully and in general conscientiously” (p. 254).
- 8.
TN: References to the Russian edition. The English translation is in Lenin (1977), p. 310.
- 9.
TN: The Black Hundreds were an ultra-nationalist movement in Russia in the early twentieth century. It is used here as a term of abuse, meaning “reactionary”, as Einstein was originally a supporter of Mach.
- 10.
TN: i.e. the Russian edition of “Materialism and Empirio-criticism”. The English translation given here is Lenin (1977), p 306.
- 11.
TN: In the context of Russian Orthodox Church history, the Old Believers, or Old Ritualists separated after 1666 from the official Russian Orthodox Church in protest against church reforms introduced by Patriarch Nikon of Moscow between 1652 and 1666.
- 12.
BH and VE: Here is a correct reference: Comrade Timiryazev writes that the Schrödinger theory appeared in the autumn of 1926. As a matter of fact, Schrödinger’s first works appeared in February 1926.
- 13.
BH and VE: (Kirchhoff 1897). TN: The translation from the Russian text is given here. It is apparently intended to correspond to the original German sentence in Kirchhoff (1897), p. 1: “Die Mechanik ist die Wissenschaft von der Bewegung; als ihre Aufgabe bezeichnen wir: die in der Natur vor sich gehenden Bewegungen “vollständig” und “auf die einfächste Weise” zu beschreiben.” This translates as “Mechanics is the science of movement; we define as its task: to describe completely and in the simplest manner the movements taking place in nature.” The authors italicising of “description” does not correspond to the original.
- 14.
TN: The English translation is given here, (Lenin 1977), p. 171.
- 15.
TN: The authors are presumably referring to Kirchhoff (1897). The translation from the Russian text is given here. Although given in quotes it appears to be attempting to summarise Kirchhoff’s view on force (Kraft) rather than giving an exact quotation. To suggest that Kirchoff wants to “remove” the concept of force from mechanics is not really correct, rather he wants to remove obscure definitions referring to force. In the Preface he writes that “One tends to define mechanics as the science of the forces, and the forces as the causes which produce, or strive to produce, motions . . . it seems to me [to be] desirable to remove from it such obscurities, even if that is only possible by narrowing its task.” German original: “Man pflegt die Mechanik als die Wissenschaft von den Kräften zu definiren, und die Kräfte als die Ursachen, welche Bewegungen hervorbringen oder hervorzubringen streben. . . scheint es mir wünschenswerth, solche Dunkelheiten aus ihr zu entfernen, auch wenn das nur möglich ist durch eine Einschränkung ihrer Aufgabe.”.
- 16.
TN: The Balmer series refers to lines at certain frequencies in the spectrum of light of a hydrogen atom. Rydberg gave a formula to calculate the frequencies of such lines. The formula for hydrogen contains a constant named after him.
- 17.
BH and VE: Maxwell, “Matter and motion”, Russian translation, p. 1. TN: Italics added by BH and VE. The English original given here is Maxwell (1876), or https://archive.org/details/mattermotion00maxwiala/page/n8/mode/2up, pp. 1–2.
- 18.
BH and VE: Silvanus P. Thompson, “Life of Lord Kelvin, vol. 2,” p. 1073. TN: (Thompson 2005), pp. 1072–3.
- 19.
TN: Latin, first person plural future active indicative of ignoro (“we won’t know”).
- 20.
TN: Sir Joseph John “J. J.” Thomson, (1856–1940), famous British physicist. He discovered the electron, for which he received the Nobel Prize. He also discovered isotopes, and invented the mass spectrometer.
- 21.
TN: “H. E.” is the author’s name given in the article in Chap. 2, obviously referring to Hessen and Egorshin.
- 22.
- 23.
TN: Fictionalist: Reference to the German Kantian philosopher Hans Vaihinger’s “Philosophy of As If.” See (Vaihinger 2000).
- 24.
BH and VE: M. Planck, “Physical laws in the light of new research”, Russian translation in Uspekhi Fizicheskikh Nauk, 6 (1926), p. 192. TN: German original, (Planck 1926). The translation closely follows the original.
- 25.
BH and VE: A. F. Joffe says, “A theory describing material phenomena and physical processes in matter cannot contradict the materialistic worldview if only it aspires to describe qualities of matter in the best possible way.” What is the specific content of a physical theory is a “question of expedience” (Pravda, 1 January 1927).
Regarding this paragraph A. K. Timiryazev comments as follows, “He (A. F. Joffe) definitely equates materialism and Machist philosophy ...with just one word economical substituted by the word expedient” (Pravda, 26 February 1927). A. K. Timiryazev is surprisingly generous with the label “Machism”. A. F. Joffe everywhere speaks of matter, but Comrade Timiryazev sees here a “complex of sensations”.
A. F. Joffe uses an unfortunate expression “expediency”. However, the whole context demonstrates whether it expresses a Machist “description” or not. A. F. Joffe’s next sentence is, “The best of these ideas (of matter) is the one that closer than others approximates the qualities of real matter.” Consequently, A. F. Joffe uses “expediency” in the sense of conformity to reality.
Therefore, here is an obviously inappropriate accusation of Machism that counts on readers being too lazy to look up A. F. Joffe’s article.
- 26.
TN: Lenin criticises “to conceive motion without matter” as idealist. Lenin (1977), pp. 266–273.
- 27.
TN: The authors refer to the article in Chap. 2, pp. 20–21.
- 28.
TN: i.e. Chap. 2, p. 20.
- 29.
TN: The authors are referring to A. K. Timiryazev’s article in the collection: Natural science and dialectical materialism (Moscow: Materialist Publishers, 1925).
- 30.
TN: Ibid. p. 321.
- 31.
TN: William Wien (1864–1928), a leading German physicist. He is best known for his work on heat (black-body) radiation for which he won the Nobel Prize in 1911.
- 32.
TN: (Wien 1926), p. 14. The translation here closely follows the German original.
- 33.
TN: See p. 38, n. 26 above.
- 34.
TN: Erwin Madelung (1881–1972), a German physicist who worked on atomic physics and quantum mechanics gave an alternative “hydrodynamical” interpretation of Schrödinger’s equation.
- 35.
- 36.
TN: (Madelung 1926a), p. 1004.
- 37.
TN: Thomson developed a theory of “ether mass” in which the electromognetic field contributed to the mass of a charged particle, an approach which was eventually incorporated in Einstein’s theory of special relativity. Thomson’s initial paper in 1881 was Thomson (1881).
- 38.
TN: See p. 39, n. 30.
- 39.
BH and VE: (Darwin 1927).
- 40.
BH and VE: Compare (Schrödinger 1926). Particularly, paragraphs 2 and 7.
- 41.
BH and VE: It is interesting to note that Comrade Timiryazev, who considers Heisenberg’s and Schrödinger’s theories unacceptable for materialistic physics, has never spoken on this matter in the discussions that took place at the congress of physicists.
- 42.
TN: Napostovstvo (Onguardism)—a group of proletarian writers who published a magazine Na postu in 1923–1925. According to Joravsky (2019), pp. 159–160, in literary disputes they were a tendency that wanted “to reject ‘bourgeois culture’ indiscriminately and to advocate unreasoning force in promoting ‘proletarian’ culture.”.
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Hessen, B., Egorshin, V. (2021). On Comrade Timiryazev’s Attitude to Modern Science. 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_3
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