Viktor Robertowitsch Bursian

Viktor Robertovich Bursian ( Russian Виктор Робертович Бурсиан * December 25, 1886 ^{. Jul} / 6. January  1887 ^greg. In St. Petersburg ; † 15. December 1945 in Leningrad ) was a Russian physicist and university teacher .

Life

Bursian came from a German St. Petersburg family. His father Robert Robertowitsch Bursian was chief physician in the children's homes of Empress Maria Fyodorovna and a surgeon in the Russian army with a focus on massage and sports medicine . His mother Anna Antonowna b. Walter came from a family of scientists.

Bursian attended the German St. Petersburg Annenschule and graduated from it in 1904 as the best with a gold medal. Then he began studying at the University of St. Petersburg in the mathematical - physical faculty . In 1906 he studied two semesters at the University of Tübingen at the invitation of Friedrich Paschen . He graduated from the University of St. Petersburg in 1910 and then taught.

After the October Revolution , Bursian held lectures from 1918 at the University of Petrograd and at the Petrograd Polytechnic Institute . In addition, he became the first scientific secretary and the first head of the theoretical department of the Physics-Technical Institute in Petrograd, founded by AF Joffe in 1918 . In 1920 he became a member of the Atomic Commission headed by DSRoschdestwenski to investigate the structures of atoms and their spectra at the Petrograd Wawilow Institute for Optics .

Bursian's fields of work were the physics of electrical currents through gases and vacuum , thermal emission , dispersion , the electron theory of solids and chain reactions . He wrote textbooks on electrodynamics , thermodynamics and electron emission theory . He was the first to develop electrical methods for geological exploration . 1928–1933 he took part in the geological expedition to the Urals , the West Siberian lowlands, the Kuzbass , the Kuznetsk Alatau and the Caspian Depression . He also translated Orest Chwolson's book Die Evolution des Geistes der Physik, 1873–1923, into German.

From 1932 Bursian headed a chair at the University of Leningrad as a professor and in 1933 became dean of the physical faculty there. In 1934 he became director of the Physical Research Institute (NIFI, since 1998 WA Fock Institute) at the University of Leningrad. In addition, he was an employee of the Geological Committee (GeolKom) , which in 1939 became the All-Russian Research Institute of Geology.

During the Stalinist purges was Bursian 1936 in connection with the Pulkovo-case arrested when the NKVD many scientists from the Pulkovo Observatory and other research institutions for participation in a fascist - Trotskyist - Zinovievite organization in 1932 by the German secret services to overthrow the Soviet power and Building a fascist dictatorship had been formed. Bursian was sentenced in 1937 by the Supreme Military Court to 10 years in a labor camp, which he spent in the special technical office of the NKVD with heat calculations . At the beginning of the German-Soviet War he was evacuated to Molotov with the OKB special design office . In May 1945 he returned to Leningrad and died of kidney disease in the prison hospital . In 1956 the rehabilitation took place .

Bursian was married to Alisa Adolfowna Ferchmin since 1929 and had two sons, a physicist and a philologist , who were evacuated from Kazan in 1942–1945 .

Individual evidence

1. ↑ ^{a b c d} Sakharov Center : Бурсиан Виктор Робертович (accessed on February 6, 2017).
2. ↑ Бурсиан Э. В .: Viktor Robertovich Bursian (1886–1945) . In: Sov. Phys. Usp. tape 31 , no. 6 , 1988, pp. 555-557 , doi : 10.1070 / PU1988v031n06ABEH003565 .
3. ↑ Orest D. Chwolson, VR Bursian: The Evolution of the Spirit of Physics, 1873-1923 . F. Vieweg & Sohn, Braunschweig 1925.