Boris Michailowitsch Hesse

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Boris Mikhailovich Hessen ( Russian Борис Михайлович Гессен ), also Gessen (born August 16 . Jul / 28. August  1893 greg. In Jelisawetgrad ; † 20th December 1936 in Moscow ) was a Soviet physicist , philosopher and historian of science . He was best known for his lecture on Newton's Principia (London 1931), which became influential in the history of science.

biography

Boris Hessen was born into a Jewish family. His father was a bank clerk (later Hesse nationalized his father's bank during the revolution). He went to high school in Jelisavetgrad . Together with his school friend Igor Tamm , he studied physics and natural sciences at the University of Edinburgh (1913-1914). He then studied physics at the St. Petersburg State University (1914–1917) and economics at the Polytechnic.

In the Russian Civil War he joined the Red Army and became a communist and member of the Revolutionary Military Council (1919–1921). From 1921 to 1924 he was at the communist Sverdlovsk University. He also continued his physics studies and finally completed his studies in Moscow in 1928 at the "Institute for Red Professors". After working at this institute for two more years, he became a professor and head of the physics department at Lomonosov University in Moscow in 1931 . In 1933 he was elected to the Russian Academy of Sciences . Under his leadership, physics at the Lomonossow flourished with the school of Leonid Mandelstam , who also belonged to Tamm, and who shielded Hessen from attacks by party physicists. However, he later announced in his Soviet encyclopedia article about the ether an ideological rejection of the theory of relativity, which made him the subject of ridicule by the Leningrad theoretical physicists around George Gamow , Lev Landau , and Dmitri Ivanenko ; they sent him a satirical telegram. This resulted in temporary professional disadvantages for them. Hessen was outraged and arranged for a meeting of the Leningrad Joffe Institute, at which Landau, Bronstein and the two students had to appear and their actions were condemned (Gamow was not affected because he was not employed there). Landau and Bronstein lost their teaching posts at the Polytechnic Institute, but were allowed to continue research at the Röntgen Institute, the two students lost their scholarships and had to leave Leningrad. There were, however, proposals to ban all signatories from the largest Russian cities, but that turned out to be just as little as the attempted condemnation of Gamov by the university and academy.

Gamow characterizes him in his biography as a former school teacher who knew something about physics, but mostly made the talk as a photographer ( making very good portraits of the pretty coeds ), and who was the red director of the Physics Institute of Lomonosov University (with Mandelstam as scientific director), charged with preventing idealistic deviations from the doctrine of dialectical materialism.

In 1931, Hesse gave his famous lecture The Socio-Economic Roots of Newton's Principia at the Second International Congress for the History of Science in London . He initiated decades of disputes about a more externalistic or internalistic writing of the history of science. Robert K. Merton tried in Science, Technology and Society in Seventeenth Century England (1938) to offer an alternative non-Marxist interpretation of the scientific revolution. The Hessen -Grossmann thesis stems from Hessen and Henryk Grossmann , which says that theoretical mechanics arose from dealing with the existing machines in the 17th century and not the other way around. Hessen also formulated the reverse that heat and electricity theory had not yet been developed because there were no corresponding machines such as steam engines or electric motors.

In Great Britain, the contributions of Hesse and other Soviet academics at the congress met with an enthusiastic response from socialist academics.

From 1934 to 1936 Hesse was deputy director of the Lebedew Institute in Moscow, which was headed by Sergei Ivanovich Wawilow . On August 21, 1936, Hessen was arrested by the NKVD . In a secret trial before a military court , he and his teacher at the Arkady Osipovich Apirin grammar school were charged with Trotskyism . You were found guilty on December 20, 1936 and executed by shooting that same day . In the investigation files of the Hesse case, the only evidence for the allegations is the testimony of Nikolai Afanassjewitsch Karjew , the deputy chairman of the planning commission of the Academy of Sciences who was also executed in 1936 and who described him as a central member of the "Trotskyist" organization of Grigory Zinoviev .

On April 21, 1956, both were posthumously rehabilitated.

Publications

  • Boris Hessen, The Social and Economic Roots of Newton's Principia in: Nicolai I. Bukharin, Science at the Crossroads , London 1931 (Reprint New York 1971), pp. 151-212. New translation in: Gideon Freudenthal, Peter Mc Laughlin (see below), pp. 41–101.
  • Boris Hessen: Les racines sociales et économiques des "Principia" de Newton: une rencontre entre Newton et Marx à Londres in 1931 /. Trad. et commentaires de Serge Guérout; postface de Christopher Chilvers .- Paris: Vuibert, 2006.
  • Gideon Freudenthal, Peter Mc Laughlin: The Social and Economic Roots of the Scientific Revolution. , Texts by Boris Hessen and Henryk Grossmann. Springer, Heidelberg, New York, 2009 (Boston Studies in the Philosophy of Science, Vol. 278), ISBN 978-1-4020-9603-7 .
  • Pablo Huerga Melcón, La ciencia en la encrucijada. Análisis crítico de la célebre ponencia de Boris Mihailovich Hessen, "Las raíces socioeconómicas de la mecánica de Newton", desde las coordenadas del materialismo filosófico ", Biblioteca Filosofía en español, Fundación Gustaviedei. Prà ole Kara Murza)

See also

literature

  • Gideon Freudenthal: The Hessen-Grossman Thesis: An Attempt at Rehabilitation. In: Perspectives on Science , Summer 2005, Volume 13, No. 2, pp. 166-193.
  • Loren R. Graham : The Socio-Political Roots of Boris Hessen: Soviet Marxism and the History of Science. In: Social Studies of Science , Volume 15, No. 4 (Nov. 1985), pp. 705-722.
  • Dieter Wittich, Horst Poldrack_ The London Congress on the History of Science 1931 and the problem of determining the development of knowledge. Akademie-Verlag, Berlin, 1990.
  • Gennady Gorelik: "My anti-Soviet activity ...": Russian physicists under Stalin . Vieweg, Braunschweig / Wiesbaden 1995, ISBN 3-528-06584-2 .

Web links

Footnotes

  1. ↑ The date of death is usually given incorrectly, including on the website of the Russian Academy of Sciences [1] . The exact date was recently determined by the Russian Memorial Association .
  2. ↑ Gennady Gorelik: "My anti-Soviet activity ...": Russian physicists under Stalin . Vieweg, Braunschweig / Wiesbaden 1995, ISBN 3-528-06584-2 , p. 47.
  3. ↑ According to Hesse, Einstein would have made a mistake in rejecting the ether and it would be the main task of Soviet science to prove its existence and properties. Einstein's rejection of the ether would be incompatible with dialectical materialism and the idealistic ideas of Einstein and his theory of relativity would run counter to the fundamental principles of Marxism.
  4. ↑ A cat that represented Hessen (according to Gamow he had a certain resemblance to cats), on a heap of rubbish with bottles and cans, which, in addition to sardines and the like, also contained the names of outdated physical theories, such as the doctrine of the four elements, electricity as a liquid , the phlogiston and the ether. The letter was signed by Gamow, Landau, A. Bronstein and two students.
  5. ↑ Shown in Gamow: My World Line. Viking Press 1970, pp. 96f. See also Gorelik, loc.cit., P. 32ff. According to Gorelik, p. 48, however, he recognized the special theory of relativity.
  6. ↑ Gamow: My World Line. P. 94
  7. ↑ Gideon Freudenthal, Oliver Schlaudt: The materialist program. In: Sabine Maasen, Mario Kaiser, Martin Reinhart, Barbara Sutter (Eds.): Handbuch Wissenschaftssoziologie. Springer, Wiesbaden, 2012, ISBN 978-3-531-17443-3 , pp. 35–45, here pp. 38–40.
  8. ↑ Gary Werskey: The Marxist Critique of Capitalist Science: A History in Three Movements? In: The Human Nature Review. March 1, 2007, archived from the original on May 7, 2007 ; accessed on November 27, 2019 (English).
  9. ↑ Gennady Gorelik: "My anti-Soviet activity ...": Russian physicists under Stalin . Vieweg, Braunschweig / Wiesbaden 1995, ISBN 3-528-06584-2 , p. 132.
personal data
SURNAME Hessen, Boris Michailowitsch
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Gessen, Boris Michailowitsch; Гессен, Борис Михайлович (Russian)
BRIEF DESCRIPTION Russian physicist, philosopher and historian of science
DATE OF BIRTH August 28, 1893
PLACE OF BIRTH Jelisavetgrad
DATE OF DEATH December 20, 1936
Place of death Moscow