Matwei Petrovich Bronstein

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Matwei Petrovich Bronstein

Matvei Petrovich Bronstein ( Russian Матвей Петрович Бронштейн ; born November 19 . Jul / 2. December  1906 greg. In Vinnytsia , † 18th February 1938 in Leningrad ) was a Russian theoretical physicist.

Life

Bronstein was the son of a doctor, studied at Leningrad University from 1926 to 1932 and then worked at the Leningrad Physics-Technical Institute (FTI or PTI), where Jakow Ilyich Frenkel and Abram Fyodorowitsch Ioffe were the leading scientists. He was considered one of the leading young theoretical scientists, with colleagues from the institute such as Lev Landau , who went to Kharkov in 1932 , George Gamow and Dmitri Iwanenko . He gave lectures at the institute, wrote review articles and numerous popular science articles. Arkadi Migdal was one of his students in 1936 .

Bronstein worked in various physical fields in the 1930s, from the theory of semiconductors and quantum electrodynamics to astrophysics and cosmology . His review articles on semiconductor physics , then one of the new research areas of the Leningrad Institute, were very influential. He turned down an offer from Frenkel in 1934 to receive his Russian doctorate. He also held lectures on the institute's second research focus, nuclear physics , and from 1932 was assigned to the institute's corresponding group, headed by Ioffe and Kurtschatow . However, he himself published little on nuclear physics and pursued applications in astrophysics (origin of cosmic rays and supernova explosions). In 1931 there was a scandal at the institute when the younger theorists Gamow, Bronstein, Landau, Iwanenko and others. a. Boris Hessen (1893–1936), director of the Physics Institute of Moscow University , who at the time was not up to date with an article on ether in the Soviet encyclopedia , sent a mocking letter: In addition to an ether bottle, there was also a phlogiston -Bottle shown. In 1932 he translated Paul Dirac's quantum mechanics textbook into Russian (with Ivanenko), it was published in 1937. Today he is best known because he was one of the first to investigate the problems of quantum gravity . Like Markus Fierz and Wolfgang Pauli as well as Léon Rosenfeld , he recognized that the linearized field theory of gravitation, in accordance with the general relativity theory , corresponds to the quantum theory of spin-2 fields, but saw difficulties in quantization before and from the non-linear character of the theory assumed that in the end a radically new understanding of the space-time concept would be necessary. At that time there was no consensus among theoretical physicists that gravity has to be quantized at all.

In one of his last works, Bronstein refuted an explanation, which was also officially favored in the Soviet Union at that time , of the redshift of the galaxies discovered by Edwin Hubble , not through the expansion of the universe, but through the aging (decay) of the photons. At that time there was a campaign against modern physics in the Soviet Union, which also temporarily cost leading theorists such as Igor Tamm and Leonid Mandelstam their license to teach.

But Bronstein also dealt with practical questions, e.g. For example, he wrote a paper on an electromagnetic measurement method for the speed of an airplane, which Kurchatov received.

During the waves of purges in the 1930s, to which the famous theoretical physicist Lew Landau almost fell victim, he was arrested and sentenced to death after one of the short "trials" of the NKVD , which took place on the assembly line at the time, and shortly afterwards in the basement of Executed Leningrad NKVD prison. The exact reason is unknown (he was not related to Leon Trotsky , as is sometimes claimed). It may have something to do with the fact that he rejected the request of his publisher to write the untruth in his last book for patriotic reasons, and even described it as "fascist". The book was pulped. His wife, the poet and later human rights activist Lidija Chukovskaya , was told that he had been sentenced to 10 years of forced labor without being able to contact him.

Bronstein was also the author of several Russian popular science books: Solar Matter , a book for children, and Structure of Matter (1935), inventor of the radio and X-rays , which were reissued after his rehabilitation in 1957. He was also planning a book on Galileo .

George Gamow quotes him as Abatic Bronstein in his autobiography .

literature

  • Gennadi E. Gorelik, Victor Ya. Frenkel: Matvei Petrovich Bronstein and Soviet Theoretical Physics in the Thirties . Birkhäuser, Basel a. a. 1994, ISBN 3-7643-2752-9 , ( Science networks 12), (Russian original: Nauka, Moscow 1990, ISBN 5-02-000670-X , ( Naučno-biografičeskaja literatura ), (with reprints of some works by Bronstein and a résumé written by him from 1935)).
  • Gennady Gorelik: "My anti-Soviet activity ..." Russian physicist under Stalin . Vieweg, Braunschweig a. a. 1995, ISBN 3-528-06584-2 .
  • John Stachel : Early History of Quantum Gravity 1916-1940 . In: Bala R. Iyer: Black holes, gravitational radiation and the universe. Essays in honor of CV Vishveshwara . Kluwer, Dordrecht u. a. 1999, ISBN 0-7923-5308-0 , ( Fundamental theories of physics 100).
  • Gorelik, H. Rotter: Matwej Bronstein and the beginnings of quantum gravity . In: Physikalische Blätter , Volume 51, 1995, pp. 423-425, doi: 10.1002 / phbl.19950510516
  • Bronstein: Quantum theory of weak gravitational fields , Physical Journal of the Soviet Union, Volume 9, 1936, pp. 140–157, reprinted as an English translation: Quantum theory of weak gravitational fields . In: George FR Ellis , Malcolm AH MacCallum, Andrzej Krasinski (eds.) Golden Oldies in General Relativity. Hidden Gems . Springer Verlag, 2013

Web links

Remarks

  1. ↑ His character was, however, diametrically opposed to Landau's sometimes sarcastic tone. His nickname was "monk" and he is said to never have failed anyone in exams
  2. ↑ z. B. On the expanding universe : Physical Journal of the Soviet Union , Volume 3, 1933, pp. 73-82
  3. ↑ At that time academic degrees were reintroduced
  4. ↑ Phlogiston referred to the hypothetical warmth substance of the 18th century
  5. ↑ Quantum theory of weak gravitational fields . In: Physical Journal of the Soviet Union , Volume 9, 1936, pp. 140–157. On the question of a possible theory of the world as a whole (Russian) In: Uspeki Astron.Nauka , Volume 3, 1933, pp. 3-30. The subject of his habilitation in 1935 was the quantization of gravitational waves
  6. ^ Gorelik: My anti-Soviet activity . Vieweg, 1995, p. 96
  7. ^ Gorelik: My anti-Soviet activity . Vieweg, 1995, p. 136
  8. ↑ Further victims were the aspiring theoretical physicists Semjon Petrowitsch Schubin on November 28, 1938 and Alexander Adolfowitsch Witt in early 1938, both from the Mandelstam school.
  9. ^ Gorelik: My anti-Soviet activity . Vieweg, 1995, p. 167. Trotsky was originally called Bronstein.
  10. ^ Gorelik: My anti-Soviet activity . Vieweg, 1995, p. 97. There is only one journal version of it
  11. ↑ Gamow: My World Line . Viking Press, 1970, p. 94
personal data
SURNAME Bronstein, Matwei Petrovich
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Бронштейн, Матвей Петрович (Russian)
BRIEF DESCRIPTION Russian physicist
DATE OF BIRTH December 2, 1906
PLACE OF BIRTH Vinnytsia , Podolia Governorate , Russian Empire
DATE OF DEATH February 18, 1938
Place of death Leningrad , Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic, Soviet Union