Pyotr Petrovich Lazarev

Pyotr Petrovich Lazarev

Pyotr Petrovich Lasarew ( Russian Пётр Петрович Лазарев ; * March 31st ^July / April 12th  1878 ^reg. In Moscow ; † April 23, 1942 in Alma-Ata ) was a Russian physicist , geophysicist , biophysicist and university lecturer .

Life

Lasarew, son of a surveyor , attended grammar school from 1888–1896 and then studied at the medical faculty of Moscow University (MGU) with a degree in 1901. His interest in physiology led him to physics , embodied by Hermann von Helmholtz and Jacques Loeb . In 1902 he received his doctorate in medicine . He then became an assistant at the ear clinic of the MGU's medical faculty, founded by Yulia Ivanovna Basanova . In 1903 he passed the examination for the entire course of the physics and mathematics faculty of the MGU as an external student . His first two scientific studies dealt with the independence of the auditory impression from the phase differences of the overtones and the mutual influence of hearing and visual perception.

In 1903 Lazarev began attending the Pyotr Nikolayevich Lebedev colloquium . In the same year he went to Strasbourg and wrote a doctoral thesis in Ferdinand Braun's laboratory at the University of Strasbourg . In 1907 Lasarew became a private lecturer at the MGU. He worked in Lebedev's laboratory and gave lectures on introductory physics, photochemistry and biophysics . In 1911 he defended his master's thesis on the temperature jump in heat conduction at the interface between solid and gas in the area of ​​a free path of a molecule . In the same year he left the MGU together with many others in protest against the interference of the new education minister Léon Casso in the autonomy rights of the university ( Casso affair ). Lazarev was now working at the Municipal Moscow Schanjawski - People's University and rented for Lebedev's laboratory a basement -space. In 1912 he defended his doctoral thesis on photochemistry at the University of Warsaw with a quantitative study of the fading of color pigments in the visible part of the spectrum .

After Lebedev's death in 1912, Lazarev worked in the physical laboratory of the Moscow Technical University . He had taught there since 1908 and was elected professor in 1912. In 1916 he turned down a call to the University of Petrograd as the successor to Orest Danilowitsch Chwolsons . When he in March 1917 as a successor to the late Boris Borisovich Golitsyn a member of the Russian Academy of Sciences for physics chair was elected, he made it a condition of being able to stay in Moscow. 1917–1920 he was professor at the chair for physics at MGU. In 1917 he headed the first Russian research institute for physics, for which a building was built at the end of 1916 by the architect Alexander Nikolajewitsch Sokolow with private funds . Here were Sergey Ivanovich Vavilov , Grigori Alexandrovich Gamburzew , Vasily Vladimirovich Schuleikin , Mikhail Leontovich , Boris Derjaguin , Pyotr Alexandrovich Rehbinder , Alexander Sawwitsch Predwoditelew , Mikhail Pavlovich Wolarowitsch and Eduard Vladimirovich Schpolski his students.

Soon after the October Revolution , Lazarev became chairman of the Commission for the Improvement of the Living Conditions of Medical Professionals and a member of the Central Commission for the Improvement of the Living Conditions of Scientists. He organized the establishment of X-ray cabinets for the sick and wounded of the Red Army . The laboratory of the previous Physics Research Institute was now part of the Red Army and was still headed by Lazarev as director. The sensory perceptions were examined under military conditions. The study of the spectral reflectivity of various colored objects became the scientific basis for the selection of camouflage colors . At the suggestion of the People's Commissar for Health Nikolai Alexandrovich Semashko , Lazarev took over the general management of the X-ray, Electromedicine and Photobiology sections of the People's Commissariat for Health. The X-ray examination of the sick Lenin was carried out in Lazarev's laboratory.

When the Soviet government was asked to buy the maps of the Kursk Magnetic Anomaly made by Ernst Gustav Leyst , which were now in Germany, for a considerable amount, Lazarev offered to re-create these maps for a smaller amount, which he did in 1918 organized a large geophysical project. In the same year he organized the publication of the new Physics Journal Uspechi Fisitscheskich Nauk (UFN) , the English translation of which Physics-Uspekhi (Advances in Physical Sciences) has become an internationally recognized specialist journal. Lasarev also organized investigations to determine the causes of ocean currents depending on the trade winds .

On Lazarev's initiative, the People's Commissariat for Health founded the Research Institute for Physics and Biophysics in 1919 , which Lazarev then headed. The scientific staff included Grigori Samuilowitsch Landsberg , Alexander Lwowitsch Minz , Sergei Nikolajewitsch Rschewkin , Sergei Wassiljewitsch Krawkow and Trofim Kononowitsch Molody .

In January 1929, Lazarev criticized the fact that in the election for members of the Academy of Sciences of the USSR (AN-SSSR, from 1991 Russian Academy of Sciences (RAN)) by a by-election only communists became full members of the AN-SSSR. In a lecture on the dialectic of nature he pointed out a mistake by Friedrich Engels in the problem √ − 1, whereupon he was denounced several times . The GPU became particularly aware of Lasarev's extensive correspondence with foreign scientists. On the night of March 5, 1931, Lazarev was arrested in his apartment at the Institute of Physics and Biophysics. By decision of the People's Commissariat for Health, he lost the director's office and the chair at the Moscow Electromechanical Institute (MEMI) . The Institute for Physics and Biophysics was handed over to the Supreme Council for Economics and converted into a chemical institute for special tasks. All of Lazarev's academic staff were dismissed. The institute's extensive scientific equipment had disappeared. According to Vladimir Ivanovich Vernadsky's diary, Lazarev had to explain his foreign relations in detail and in full. Lazarev's wife Olga Alexandrovna campaigned in vain for her husband at the GPU and the People's Commissar for Health Nikolai Alexandrovich Semashko, who supported Lazarev. She hanged herself on June 13, 1931, which her husband found out late. A group of scientists led by Alexei Nikolajewitsch Bach stood up for Lazarev and did not send requests to Valerian Vladimirovich Kuibyshev , who was not a friend of the AN-SSSR, but to its rival Vyacheslav Mikhailovich Molotov . Lazarev was released from prison in September 1931 and exiled to Sverdlovsk . Lazarev suffered from epilepsy and was thinking of suicide . In Sverdlovsk, he lectured at the Institute for Geological Prospecting and at the Institute for Occupational Diseases and worked on contributions from biophysics to medicine. The local Diamachiki and geologists came to his last closed lecture before his release in the GPU about the beginning and end of the universe . At the end of February 1932, Lazarev was able to return to Moscow due to the efforts of Mikhail Alexandrowitsch Menzbier and his colleagues and students, as Vernadsky wrote in his diary. Lazarev remained under criticism and in 1938 he was accused of pseudoscientific theories.

After his return in 1932, Lazarev headed the chair of physics in the geophysical department of the Moscow Geological Prospecting Institute (MGRI), which had appointed him to the chair of Earth Physics shortly before his arrest . In 1934 he became head of the biophysics department of the All Union Institute for Experimental Medicine in Moscow. In 1938 this department became the special biophysics laboratory of the AN-SSSR. Lazarev examined the processes of physiological adaptation of sensory perception to the stimuli acting on it. He applied the laws of thermodynamics to biological processes. He examined the effect of the electric current on the nerve tissue and developed a theoretical basis for the Nernst equation and the Pflüger-Zuckungsgesetz .

Lazarev wrote a number of popular scientific works on the history of Russian and foreign science. He wrote a memory book about PN Lebedev, biographies of Nikolai Alexejewitsch Umow , Alexander Grigorievich Stoletov and others. In his work on the history of exact science in Russia over the course of 200 years, he added self-drawn portraits of Russian scientists from Mikhail Wassiljewitsch Lomonossow to Ilya Ilyich Metschnikow . He dedicated a special book to the life and work of Hermann von Helmholtz, whom he admired.

In 1940 Lazarev was elected Vice President of the Moscow Society of Naturalists . After the beginning of the German-Soviet war , Lasarew was evacuated to Alma-Ata with the special biophysics laboratory . There Lazarev died of gastric cancer with metastases in the brain . He was buried in Moscow in the Novodevichy Cemetery.

Web links

• Literature by and about Pyotr Petrowitsch Lasarew in the catalog of the German National Library
• Literature by and about Pyotr Petrovich Lasarew in the bibliographic database WorldCat

Individual evidence

1. ↑ ^{a b c d} MGU: Лазарев Пётр Петрович (accessed March 15, 2019).
2. ↑ ^{a b c d e f} RAN: Лазарев Петр Петрович, (1878–1942), физик, ординарный академик АН (1917) (accessed March 15, 2019).
3. ↑ Lazarew PP: Выцветание красок и пигментов в видимом свете. Опыт изучения основных законов химического действия света (Докторская дисс.) . Изд. Моск. ун-та., Moscow 1911.
4. ↑ Репрессии членов Академии наук. Лазарев Петр Петрович (accessed March 15, 2019).
5. ↑ Lazarev PP: Исследования по адаптации . Изд. АН СССР, Moscow 1947.