S. A. Boguslavsky

(Obituary)

G. S. Landsberg.

On September 3, 1923, Professor Sergei Anatolievich Boguslavsky of Moscow University passed away. He was brought to the grave by a complication of the tubercular process from which he had suffered since the age of 17. One may say that his whole life passed under the sign of this terrible disease. It did not allow him to finish gymnasium; it interrupted his first scientific work in Göttingen, and more than once interrupted his later work as well; with a threatening warning, during his stay at Saratov University, it put an end to his attempt to increase his teaching activity somewhat; and, finally, it cut short his life at the very height of his spiritual powers, when he, full of plans and surrounded by hopes, was preparing to take charge of the Physical Institute of Moscow University... It was not for nothing that his friends marveled at how, with this dreadful companion, he could make his way along the most difficult field of scientific creativity, making up for the insufficiency of his physical strength by the strength of his spirit and by his extraordinary abilities.

S. A. was born in Moscow on December 1, 1883. In the summer of 1901, having entered the 8th class, he fell ill with tuberculosis and was forced to go abroad, where he spent the years from 1901 to 1915, living chiefly in Germany and Switzerland. To German science he owed his development as a scholar; Switzerland, with its climate, from time to time restored his weakening health, making it possible for him once again to devote himself wholly to his beloved work.

S. A. spent the first four semesters (1905–1907) in Freiburg, where he studied physics, mathematics, chemistry, and philosophy. From the autumn of 1907 he moved to Göttingen, where his teachers were W. Voigt, F. Klein, D. Hilbert, and G. Minkowski. After a certain interruption caused by illness, he returned again to Göttingen, and here, from the spring of 1911 to the autumn of 1913, when he received the degree of Doctor of Philosophy, his scientific outlook was definitively formed.

During this period, in addition to attending lectures and taking part in the classes of the first-rate professors whose names made Göttingen shine, he

became closely associated with a circle of young scientists and thus became fully involved in the intense scientific life of one of the chief centers of German science. S. A. always remembered these years with love and pleasure, attaching particular importance to those personal ties which were not broken until his very death.

“I owe my scientific education,” he wrote, among other things, in his curriculum vitae, “to a considerable extent to constant contact with a number of young scientists, especially with the then Privatdozenten M. Born and T. Karman, with whom I shared an apartment.”

Returning to Russia in 1915, S. A. passed the master’s examination at Petrograd University in 1917 and in April 1918 received the degree of Master of Physics after the brilliant defense of a dissertation on the topic: “Foundations of Molecular Physics.” Elected professor of theoretical physics at Saratov University, he went there in the autumn of 1918, and already in March 1919 was elected professor at Moscow University; however, until the spring of 1921 he still remained in Saratov, where, in addition to university teaching, he also served as chairman of the physico-mathematical section of the Saratov Society of Naturalists. From the spring of 1921 S. A. returned definitively to Moscow as professor of theoretical physics. On his initiative, within the Physics Institute there was established a “Cabinet of Theoretical Physics with a Laboratory,” for S. A. conceived of his university activity above all as scientific activity and believed that the chair of theoretical physics should not only become the spiritual guide of the scientific life of the Physics Institute, but also have the immediate material possibility of carrying out and directing experimental work. The winter of 1921–1922 passed in organizational worries; in the summer of 1922, worsening health, as well as the desire to renew his old scientific ties, prompted S. A. to go on a foreign research trip, from which he returned in March 1923 considerably, it seemed, refreshed physically, with a stock of most interesting impressions and broad plans for work. However, already in May he again took to his bed, and after four months of a grave and painful illness he was no more...

Among the works published during S. A.’s lifetime, one should point to a number of articles on pyroelectricity and to the dissertation devoted to the question of kinetic interpretation and the calculation of thermodynamic functions. Among the works submitted for publication but not yet printed, especially interesting are an article on black radiation, in which attention is drawn to the thermodynamic paradox connected with the conception of a wall semi-transparent to radiation, and the monograph The Paths of Electrons in Electromagnetic Fields, which could serve as an introduction to the mathematical theory of the atom and analyzes a number of cases of electron motion.

All these works, as well as the oral reports repeatedly delivered by S. A., are remarkable for that touch of elegance which characterized his entire personality in general. It is not for nothing that a letter sent by P. L. Kapitsa from Cambridge speaks of the interest with which people recall a report read by S. A. in the circle of workers of the Cavendish Laboratory—a circle in which N. Bohr, P. S. Ehrenfest, Ch. Darwin, and J. Franck spoke.

This personal elegance, the impression of correctness that emanated from all his actions, drew universal affection to him—an affection which, along with respect for his scientific merits, makes sorrow over his loss especially keen. And S. A. inspired these feelings not only in us, his Russian comrades. The writer of these lines saw what a deep impression the news of S. A.’s death made among Göttingen mathematicians and physicists. In a letter sent by M. Born to S. A.’s sister, Born writes: “Nicht nur Moskau und die russische Physik, wir alle Physiker der Welt haben an ihn viel verloren…”

In these words lie both an appraisal of the deceased and the measure of our sorrow…