V. I. Lenin and Modern Physics1

S. I. Vavilov

V. I. Lenin was a Russian intellectual in the broadest and best sense. To the great revolutionary, the brilliant theorist and practitioner of socialism, the interests of culture, science, technology, and art were always close and dear—in the years of emigration and in the era of the creation of the Soviet state.

For this reason such juxtapositions have long become customary: Lenin and economics, Lenin and historical science, Lenin and art. Among the natural sciences, V. I. Lenin’s attention was especially drawn to physics. In our time every Soviet intellectual, old and young, knows that V. I. Lenin’s book Materialism and Empirio-Criticism touches on physics on almost all its pages, while its penultimate part, “The Newest Revolution in Natural Science and Philosophical Idealism,” contains an analysis of the state of physics at the beginning of the twentieth century and a forecast of the further development of this science.

Despite the extraordinary changes and growth of physics over recent decades, V. I. Lenin’s thoughts on the philosophical premises and conclusions of our science, on its main paths—written down almost 35 years ago—have retained their significance and force also with regard to the newest stage in the development of physics. The theme “Lenin and physics,” it would seem, will remain relevant for a long time, changing only with respect to its concrete physical content.

1. The Peculiarity of the Position of Physics in the System of Sciences

Why, in the whole immense field of the natural sciences, was V. I. Lenin’s attention concentrated precisely on physics? This happened because of its special position and then because of the unusually tense state of physics at the beginning of our century.

For a long time physics had an exceptional lot among the natural sciences. Its task is the doctrine of the simplest and at the same time the most general properties of matter—of matter in the broadest Leninist sense of “objective reality.” Owing to this generality, there are not and cannot be phenomena of nature that do not possess physical properties or aspects. Therefore the participation of physics in the foundation of any branch of natural—

knowledge, even if it is confined to a simple descriptive catalogue of objects and phenomena. To compile such a catalogue one cannot do without physical conceptions of size, duration, weight, color, and so forth.

It is well known that physics, with its deepest roots, has grown into astronomy, chemistry, geology, physiology, and other natural sciences, explaining much in them, determining the character of laws, and providing methods of investigation. But, of course, the connection between physics and the rest of natural science is not one-sided. Physics itself changes and grows, besides the soil of special physical experience, on the concrete material of other sciences of nature. Classical mechanics arose chiefly on the basis of knowledge about the motions of heavenly bodies; astronomical phenomena also formed the experimental foundation of the theory of relativity, relativistic mechanics, and electrodynamics. Chemical facts and laws and, above all, Mendeleev’s periodic system determined the development of the doctrine of the structure of atoms and of quantum mechanics. There are grounds for thinking that such phenomena as the famous “red shift” in the spectra of spiral nebulae, the laws of distribution of the amounts of chemical elements on Earth and in the universe, and the principal biological phenomena will substantially modify contemporary physics in the future.

The extreme breadth, generality, and “elementarity” of its content bring physics, in its most fundamental propositions, into direct contact with philosophy, more precisely with the theory of knowledge. The “elementarity” of physical assertions makes it possible to pose problems of knowledge in the clearest and most general form, not obscured by the complexity of ordinary objects and phenomena.

For this reason, in ancient science the functions of philosopher and physicist almost always merged in one person. In subsequent development they separated; however, all the most important nodal points in the history of physics are marked by a close interweaving with the philosophical questions of the theory of knowledge. So it was at the end of the seventeenth century—in the epoch of the creation of classical mechanics; so it was in the second half of the nineteenth century—in the years when the law of conservation of energy and the principle of dissipation of energy in natural processes were being clarified and formulated; the same occurred when the foundations were being laid for the modern doctrine of the structure of matter, the theory of relativity, and the theory of quanta. Physics and the theory of knowledge are connected historically and in essence. This connection also determined V. I. Lenin’s special attention to questions of physics. “It goes without saying,” he wrote,^1 “that, in examining the question of the connection of one school of the newest physicists with the revival of philosophical idealism, we are far from any thought of touching upon the special doctrines of physics. We are interested exclusively in the epistemological conclusions from certain definite propositions and generally known discoveries.”

The role of physics in the development of culture is not exhausted by its significance for all the sciences of nature and for philosophy. In our time it is clearer than ever that physics constitutes the foundation of a number of basic and most important branches of technology. Every mechanical device, apparatus, and machine, from an axe to the most complex machine tool, is the result of the conscious application of physical laws. Building technology, hydraulic engineering, heat engineering, electrical engineering, the whole body of knowledge now called

power engineering, lighting technology in the broadest sense, and a tremendous part of military technology grew up on the soil of physics and to this day preserve it as their foundation. The reason is that the elementary character, articulation, rationality, and quantitative character of physics make it exceptionally suited to technical, inventive thought, which combines known elements for a practical purpose. Physics transfers technology from the realm of accidental discoveries onto a rational, conscious, and quantitative path.

Indeed, the probability of an accidental, empirical “discovery,” for example of the dynamo or radio, is practically equal to zero. Electrical engineering and radio engineering could arise only through physics. In this connection one may compare a very interesting remark by V. I. Lenin on technology in his notes on Hegel’s Science of Logic². “Man’s aims at first seem alien (‘other’) in relation to nature. Man’s consciousness, science (‘the concept’) reflects the essence, the substance of nature, but at the same time this consciousness is external in relation to nature (not at once, not simply coinciding with it). Mechanical and chemical technique therefore serves man’s aims because its character (composition) consists in being determined by external conditions (the laws of nature).”

2. MECHANICAL PHYSICS AND THE METHOD OF PRINCIPLES

In the history of science it is difficult to cite another example of so radical a change in the foundations as that which physics had to undergo, and still has to undergo, beginning with the first years of the twentieth century. It was precisely in these years that V. I. Lenin turned to physics.

To understand the nature of such a sharp turn it is necessary to trace the main methodological lines in the development of physical thought, which had taken shape over many centuries.

Almost from time immemorial, from Democritus and Epicurus through Archimedes, Galileo, Descartes, Newton, Faraday, Maxwell, Helmholtz to Hertz, Kelvin, and Rayleigh, there is clearly a dominant striving toward the creation of a mechanical picture of the world. Natural phenomena, from this point of view, in the most consistent conceptions of Gassendi, Descartes, Lesage, and others, are considered as the result of the motion of elementary immutable masses moving in Euclidean space. The world is composed of two articulated elements: space and moving masses. However, no one ever succeeded in carrying out such a consistent mechanical program to the end in a form acceptable for physics. To explain phenomena it was necessary to endow masses with forces; this was already anticipated by Epicurus and Lucretius, and the transformation of a purely mechanical picture into a dynamical one was carried out fully and with perfect clarity by Newton. In Hertz’s mechanics forces are replaced by “constraints” between masses, but, of course, a consistent mechanical worldview requires an additional mechanical interpretation both of “forces” and of “constraints.” Thus there arose conceptions of the ether with varied functions—luminiferous, gravitational, electromagnetic. All these ethers always

were conjectural, hypothetical, and grew only out of an a priori conviction in the purely mechanical nature of phenomena.

As has been said, the way out of the difficulties of consistent mechanism was found by Newton, who endowed masses with gravitational and other forces. The unknown, hypothetical ethers and “spirituses,” intended to save mechanical coherence, were replaced by directly measurable “forces.” Newton’s dynamism did not contradict the mechanical outlook; it merely separated the known from the unknown with clarity and distinctness. Newton’s brilliant device determined the tremendous success of his system of the world and of the theory of gravitation and, for several centuries, outlined an extraordinarily fruitful method for solving physical problems.

At the same time, by his device of introducing observable forces instead of hypothetical mechanical constructions, Newton laid the foundation of a new, powerful theoretical method of investigation, which may be called the method of principles; alongside Newton’s dynamism, it was precisely this method that determined the further development of physics. Instead of arbitrary mechanical assumptions, in the method of principles the theory is founded upon generalized facts that, in particular cases, are accessible to direct verification and observation. Such are Newton’s axioms of motion, Maxwell’s equations, the two principles of thermodynamics, and so on.

It hardly needs to be proved that both methods of investigation are legitimate, fully compatible, do not exclude one another, and can even pass into one another; however, there is no doubt that the method of principles is broader and more flexible and, at the same time, less vulnerable and more durable—provided, of course, that the principles are correct at least to some degree.

Mechanism became the embodiment of primitive, metaphysical materialism, as Lenin calls it after Engels. For most physicists, dynamism in its philosophical aspect did not differ from the purely mechanical outlook, since it was assumed that sooner or later forces would find a complete mechanical explanation by means of one or another variant of the ether. Physics lived with this conviction until the end of the nineteenth century. However, for some physicists, philosophers, and especially philosophizing theologians who flirted with science—such as Clarke and Bentley—dynamism was an expression of God’s intervention in natural phenomena. This current, however, quickly came to naught at the very beginning of the eighteenth century, passing into the straightforward primitive form of typical French materialism.

Alongside such materialism there also existed, and had quite a few adherents, idealist philosophical systems of various shades; an example of these may be Berkeley’s philosophy, on which V. I. Lenin dwells in detail as a direct predecessor of Mach. However, for Berkeley and other idealists of this epoch, the mechanical physics of their time played no noticeable role; they did not know it, or they shut their eyes to it, since they could not draw from it the arguments they needed.

Newton’s method of principles for a long time, almost until the end of the last century, gave no occasion for special philosophical conclusions. It was applied in physics; it is enough to recall, for example, Ampère’s theory, in which implicit was regarded only as a heuristic device allowing one to bypass

...to be content, in the analysis of phenomena, with no special or arbitrary mechanical hypotheses. No one, however, doubted the validity of the mechanical essence of phenomena, still hidden and inaccessible.

3. THE COLLAPSE OF THE FOUNDATIONS OF THE MECHANICAL VIEW

The situation changes sharply with the development of thermodynamics, with its two principles and Newtonian formal structure. If the first principle—the principle of conservation of energy—was quite intelligible precisely from the mechanical point of view and even provided a new basis for strengthening the mechanical view, then the second—the principle of the dissipation of energy—seemed to contradict at the root the basic feature of purely mechanical phenomena: their reversibility. It is well known that the difficulty was overcome by Boltzmann by bringing in statistics and considerations about the most probable states. However, the temporary uncertainty and hesitation concerning the validity of the mechanical foundations was sufficient for the Newtonian method of principles, in the eyes of many physicists and chemists, to turn from an addition to the method of mechanical hypotheses into its antagonist, into the opposite view, making mechanical hypotheses incorrect and superfluous. There arises the so-called “energetics,” striving to reduce all physics to a formal, thermodynamic (in the broad sense of the word) consideration of changes and transformations of energy.

Here, for example, are the words of the leader of energetics, Pierre Duhem[^3]: “The ideal of theoreticians consisted in representing phenomena by a small number of simple mechanical hypotheses, which were regarded as simple explanations. We must renounce this ideal: the better theory will be the one that introduces into its reasoning quantities that have physical meaning and are directly measurable.” Those most carried away—for example Ostwald—go so far as to dream of a time when “atoms will be encountered only in the dust of libraries.”

Quite in step with this cooling toward mechanism and the triumph of thermodynamic formalism in physics, new variations of idealist philosophy begin to develop, this time trying to base themselves on the new physics and therefore acquiring, in the eyes of many, an apparent great justification. The empiriocriticism of Mach and Avenarius grows precisely on this soil; on it, too, is built Ostwald’s very naive energetic natural philosophy.

If the crisis of mechanical physics caused by its inconsistency with the second principle of thermodynamics proved fictitious, or at any rate was temporarily averted, then later, in the last years of the past century, mechanism encountered a real and insurmountable enemy.

For a complete mechanical interpretation of phenomena, a luminiferous, gravitational, electromagnetic ether is necessary. Without an ether stretching mechanical threads between discrete masses in empty space, there is no possibility of a mechanical understanding of phenomena. The development of the ideas of the ether is a most instructive part of the history of the mechanical view of nature.

However, experiments on the propagation of light in moving media, in particular the rightly celebrated Michelson experiment, dealt an irreparable blow to the conception of the ether. These experiments showed that, if the ether exists at all, then in any case it does not possess the necessary property of any mechanical medium: it is impossible to detect the motion of bodies relative to this medium. Thus collapsed the traditional support of all mechanical hypotheses. Newtonian dynamism lost its potential mechanical character.

But this blow was followed by a second catastrophe.

A necessary feature not only of a purely mechanical conception, but also of the broader and more flexible Newtonian dynamical system, had always been held to be the continuity of motions and actions. In any processes, the change of motion and action may, with the postulate of continuity, be made infinitely small under known conditions. For example, the transfer of energy from one atom to another, or the absorption of light, from the point of view of such a conception, may occur in any portions, from zero up to arbitrarily large values.

To the general amazement of physicists, still more unexpectedly than in the catastrophe with the ether, the postulate of the continuity of motions and actions proved to be false. The most general analysis of equilibrium thermal radiation, carried out on the basis of the principles of thermodynamics and the laws of electrodynamics, led Planck to the inevitable conclusion of a discontinuous, quantum exchange of energy and momentum.

The supposition of the mechanical essence of microphenomena collapsed irrevocably, and on the threshold of the new century, at a meeting of the British Association, the acknowledged leader of mechanism, its patriarch, Lord Kelvin, had to state with sadness that “the beauty and clearness of the dynamical theory, which asserts heat and light to be modes of motion, are at present obscured by two clouds.”⁴ These clouds were the catastrophes with the ether and with quanta. In his speech Kelvin still tried to inspire hope for the dispersal of these clouds, but unsuccessfully. For everyone not hypnotized by mechanical puritanism, its collapse appeared hopeless.

The crushing storm that burst over mechanism was not limited to Kelvin’s two clouds. The dizzying experimental discoveries of electrons, of the complex structure of atoms, and of their radioactive decay led to experimental proof of the non-constancy of elementary masses, of their dependence on the velocity of motion. At the same time it became clear that the velocity of motion of masses cannot exceed the velocity of light. Mass, the fundamental property of matter, the concrete embodiment of matter in the mechanical world-view, lost its substantiality. To characterize this state of physics at the turn of the two centuries, V. I. Lenin cites the words of A. Poincaré: “Before us are the ruins of the old principles of physics, a general rout of principles.”⁵

4. A REVOLUTION IN PHYSICS AND PHILOSOPHY

Because of the special, central position of physics, which has already been discussed, the unprecedentedly profound changes in its fundamental propositions could not fail to affect all adjacent cultural fields and,

above all on philosophical thought. “One cannot take in hand literature of Machism or about Machism,” V. I. Lenin observes,^6 “without encountering pretentious references to the new physics, which allegedly refuted materialism, etc., etc. Whether these references are well-founded is another question, but the connection of the new physics—or, more precisely, of a definite school in the new physics—with Machism and other varieties of contemporary idealist philosophy is beyond the slightest doubt.” V. I. Lenin examines in detail the books of Abel Rey, Poincaré, Righi, Cohen, and many other physicists, mathematicians, and philosophers, and demonstrates these authors’ idealist interpretation of the consequences of the new physics. Abel Rey, who tried to reconcile the irreconcilable—materialism with idealism—in the preface to his book The Theory of Physics among Contemporary Physicists, very carefully studied by Lenin, says that “the general spirit of contemporary physics is being used by the fideist and anti-intellectualist movement of the last years of the nineteenth century.”^7 “If Rey,” Lenin comments, “had adhered to the correct philosophical terminology, he should have said: the materialist theory of knowledge, which was spontaneously accepted by the former physics, has been replaced by an idealist and agnostic one, which was taken advantage of by fideism, contrary to the wishes of the idealists and agnostics.”^8 Of how the sworn philosophers responded, one may judge from the statements of the neo-Kantian Cohen, cited by Lenin:^9 “Idealism permeates the new physics.” “It was the theory of electricity that was destined to produce the greatest revolution in the understanding of matter and, by converting matter into force, to bring idealism to victory.”

Summing up his analysis of the gnoseological conclusions from the results of the new physics, V. I. Lenin concludes with full justification:^10 “There can be no doubt that we are confronted with a certain international ideological current, not dependent on any one philosophical system, but arising from certain general causes that lie outside philosophy.... The basic idea of the school of new physics under consideration—the denial of objective reality given to us in sensation and reflected by our theories, or doubt as to the existence of such reality. Here this school departs from the materialism that prevails, by general admission, among physicists—departs as a school of ‘physical idealism.’”

V. I. Lenin’s conclusions are indisputable, and to his argumentation one could only add further evidence from the literature of that time. Depicting the idealist epidemic by which, in those years, many Marxists among others were seized, and mercilessly exposing them in Materialism and Empirio-Criticism, V. I. Lenin notes, however, the statements of certain physicists who firmly preserved their materialist positions despite the collapse of the mechanical foundation and the idealist philosophical dust raised over the wreckage.

V. I. Lenin mentions the irreconcilably Cartesian positions of the optician A. Cornu, who as early as 1900 declared at the international congress of physicists in Paris that: “The more we know the phenomena of nature, the more the bold Cartesian ...”

...view of the mechanism of the world; in the physical world there is nothing except matter and motion.”¹¹ Lenin dwells in considerable detail on the struggle against energetics and Machism of the last two brilliant defenders of consistent mechanism in physics, H. Hertz and L. Boltzmann.¹² On the other hand, Materialism and Empirio-Criticism gives excerpts from the presidential address of A. Rücker at the meeting of the British Association in Glasgow in 1901,¹³ in which it is pointed out that the alternative—either mechanical atoms and ethers are the sole reality, or else they are simple scientific fictions—is not obligatory.

V. I. Lenin notes in his book that, “Owing to certain unfortunate conditions of my work I have been almost completely unable to acquaint myself with the Russian literature on the question under discussion,”¹⁴ and cites only the statements of the mechanist-idealist N. I. Shishkin as presented by the Moscow philosopher L. M. Lopatin. Meanwhile, in the years of the physical crisis considered in Materialism and Empirio-Criticism, in Russia there were highly remarkable representatives of the physico-mathematical and chemical sciences: D. I. Mendeleev, P. N. Lebedev, A. G. Stoletov, N. A. Umov, B. B. Golitsyn, N. E. Zhukovsky, and others. N. A. Umov, who was always deeply interested in the fundamental questions of our science, expressed his attitude toward the events taking place in the field of physics with unfailing clarity several times over the course of twenty years. It is instructive to dwell on these statements.

In 1894, in his address “Questions of Knowledge in the Field of the Physical Sciences,”¹⁵ Umov gives a characterization of the mechanistic and energetic trends in physics, notes with sadness the attempts to pass from “explanation” of phenomena to their “description,” but in the final analysis hopes for the victory of Cartesianism. “The history of the development of physical knowledge,” says N. A. Umov, “gives both hope and reassurance. In the doubts and hesitations of the present day we discern the rivalry of two currents of scientific thought (the very same of which we have spoken.—S. V.), which revealed themselves also in the eighteenth century, when a rebuff to Cartesian teachings was heard all along the line.” Six years later, in 1900, in the article “The Present State of Physical Theories,” again analyzing the struggle of mechanism and the descriptive method in physics, N. A. Umov seeks a way out in Hertz’s mechanics.¹⁶ In N. A. Umov’s ceremonial address on Tatiana Day in 1905, which did not take place because of the events of January 9, the following lines are contained, which V. I. Lenin probably would have duly appreciated had they reached him:

“The life of the inner world of the atom will reveal to us properties and laws perhaps different from those which constitute the content of the old, already ancient physics.

Does there not sound over us a note of disappointment? We were already at the very truth, we had grasped it, and unexpectedly it moved away from us to a distance immeasurable in its remoteness!

Yes, but we have discovered that the tasks of physics consist not only in the description of phenomena and in the search for connecting links, i.e., laws. By the power of its experimental and theoretical methods it brings us nearer to a single reality lying far beyond the limits of the perceptible. We have realized once again the grandeur and the unattainable height of truth, and this

consciousness is the guarantee of uninterrupted development and unfading life of scientific thought.”

The further growth of the revolution in the field of physical conceptions—the theory of relativity, the fact of the dependence of mass on velocity, etc.—seemed to shake Umov’s calm confidence. In the speech “Characteristic Features and Tasks of Contemporary Natural-Scientific Thought”[^16], delivered at the Second Mendeleev Congress in 1911, the new stage of physics is characterized in the following words: “The subsequent development of physics is a process against matter, ending with its banishment. But alongside such negative activity there proceeded the work of reforming electromagnetic symbolism: it had to prove capable of depicting the properties of the material world, its atomistic structure, inertia, measurement, and absorption of energy.” In the speech of the Moscow physicist there occur phrases which, outwardly, sound quite idealistic: “Is it not time to banish matter... Matter has disappeared.” However, such words, unusual in Umov’s mouth, had only an outwardly and terminologically idealistic character. In reality he was speaking of the replacement in the new physics of constant mass by electromagnetic mass: “Matter has disappeared,” he remarks; “its varieties have been replaced by systems of electrical individuals mutually related to one another, and before us, instead of the familiar material world, there is drawn an electromagnetic world profoundly different from it.” It is clear that for Umov the electromagnetic world was a fully objective world, and the “disappearance of matter” was only an effective, though incautious, phrase for denoting the variable character of Newtonian masses. But the slogans of the “banishment and disappearance of matter” were perceived quite differently by philosophers and philosophizing intellectuals. “The disappearance of matter,” in the absence of philosophical clarity, in the failure to understand the dialectical character of materialism, was regarded by many as experimental proof of the collapse of materialism and of the triumph of idealist philosophy.

Despite its enormous significance for the development of science and technology, the new physics became a center around which idealism, in various forms, raised its lowered head. There were physicists who tried to oppose to the irresistible current of the new physics their stubborn, but unfounded, faith in the indestructibility of mechanical materialism; there were others, such as Riecke and Umov,[^17] who vaguely believed that a way out of the crisis would be found; and only Lenin, for the first time—and apparently alone—pointed out with complete clarity that the way out of the crisis lay not at all in idealism of any form or degree, not in preserving stubborn mechanism, not in well-intentioned faith in this or that solution to the situation, but only in dialectical materialism.

5. NEW PHYSICS AND MECHANICAL MATERIALISM

The emergence of mechanical physics is understandable. For man under ordinary conditions, the only fully general abstraction—an abstraction from the properties of the surrounding world—could consist in nothing other than the idea of the motion of individual bodies in space. Universally-

properties of bodies: volume and weight, led to the concept corresponding to mass. The primacy of mechanical conceptions is confirmed both by the history of science and by observation of the development of an individual human consciousness. The hypothesis or conviction that the microworld is constructed in a similar way constitutes the essence of mechanism. In mechanical philosophical materialism there is added to this the assertion of the objectivity of the mechanical world, of its uniqueness, and of the correct and exact reflection of this world in consciousness. “Materialism,” writes Lenin, with regard to Berkeley’s doctrine, “is the recognition of ‘objects in themselves,’ or outside the mind; ideas and sensations are copies or reflections of these objects. The opposite doctrine (idealism): objects do not exist ‘outside the mind’; objects are ‘combinations of sensations’”[^17]. From this follows Lenin’s well-known, extraordinarily broad definition of matter: “The sole ‘property’ of matter with whose recognition philosophical materialism is bound up is the property of being objective reality, of existing outside our consciousness.”

The quoted lines, which may at first glance seem self-evident, in fact contain enormous consequences and, in essence, comprise the resolution of both the physical and the philosophical crisis.

Moving immutable masses are by no means the only possible form of matter, and mechanical materialism is not the only form of materialism. “The error of Machism...,” in Lenin’s words[^18], “consists in the fact that it ignores... the distinction between metaphysical materialism and dialectical materialism. The recognition of any immutable elements, of the ‘immutable essence of things,’ and so forth, is not materialism, but metaphysical, i.e., anti-dialectical, materialism... In order to pose the question from the only correct, i.e., dialectical-materialist, standpoint, one must ask: do electrons, ether, and so forth exist outside human consciousness as objective reality or not? To this question natural scientists must likewise answer without hesitation, and they constantly do answer, yes... But dialectical materialism insists on the approximate, relative character of every scientific proposition about the structure of matter and its properties, on the absence of absolute boundaries in nature, on the transformation of moving matter from one state into another, apparently irreconcilable with it from our point of view, and so forth.” Such is Lenin’s conclusion from his definition of matter and the dialectical-materialist world view.

Further on Lenin once again insistently points out that all “immutable substances” are merely the fruit of ignorance of dialectics, and formulates the well-known proposition on the inexhaustibility of the electron and the atom. In the light of dialectical materialism the philosophical crises and doubts generated by the unexpected results of the new physics disappear like phantoms of a diseased imagination.

Among the physicists of the epoch when V. I. Lenin’s book was written, there apparently were no persons who had any conception of dialectical materialism. Lenin’s book, had it been read in time and with understanding by physicists, would probably have rendered superfluous many subsequent imaginary crises.

How astonishing it may be for us now, but the thought of the possibility of any materialism other than mechanical materialism apparently occurred to no one. By the will of historical destinies, Materialism and Empirio-criticism began to be read truly attentively and widely only after the October Revolution. Now it is so well known in our country that there is no need to expound in detail the book from which the whole Soviet land learns dialectical materialism.

It must be noted, however, that mechanical physics was by no means a historical mistake.

It grew out of ordinary experience and observations corresponding to the customary human scales of size, time, and speed.

On its foundation technology was based, and continues to be based to this day. “Mechanics,” says Lenin, referring chiefly to the dependence of mass on velocity, “was a snapshot of slow real motions; the new physics is a snapshot of gigantic rapid real motions.”

But if mechanical physics had and has a right to exist for practical reasons, then mechanical, metaphysical materialism is clearly harmful and is a brake on the development of science and philosophical thought, just like idealism.

Foreseeing the further development of physics, V. I. Lenin writes lines which, as we shall see, were justified by new stages of physics: “Present-day ‘physical’ idealism,” he writes,^19 “just like yesterday’s ‘physiological’ idealism, means only that one school of natural scientists in one branch of natural science has slid into reactionary philosophy, being unable to rise directly and at once from metaphysical materialism to dialectical materialism. This step is being and will be made by modern physics.” Elsewhere in the book^20 it is said: “The materialistic fundamental spirit of physics, as of all contemporary natural science, will conquer all crises of every kind, but only with the inevitable replacement of metaphysical materialism by dialectical materialism.”

Mechanical materialism is metaphysical because of its immobility and ossification. Its belief in the mechanical nature of phenomena is arbitrary, like every belief, because it is based only on the ordinary habit of a person who has grown up under certain natural and social conditions. In passing to the microworld, or to the world of enormous scales and velocities, it is quite possible to expect a gradual dissolution of mechanical concepts and laws.

To understand this unrecognizable transformation one needs the infinite flexibility of dialectics. Much later than Materialism and Empirio-criticism, in 1915–1916, Lenin wrote a remarkable fragment on dialectics,^21 in which there are the following lines, intended as though directly for the new and the newest physics: “Dialectics as living, many-sided knowledge (with the number of sides eternally increasing), with an abyss of shades of every approach, approximation to reality (with a philosophical system growing into a whole out of each shade)—this is the immeasurably rich content in comparison with ‘metaphysical’ materialism, the basic

could not but apply dialectics to the Bildertheorie, to the process and development of cognition.”

6. NEW PHYSICS AND DIALECTICS

The creators and active workers of the new physics, like the hero of Molière’s comedy, who learns with astonishment that he speaks prose, had to convince themselves that they had begun to speak in the language of dialectics, of which in most cases they had had no conception.

In fact, something utterly incredible took place, comprehensible and admissible only in dialectics. The empty nothing, Newton’s absolute space with the moving masses inhabiting it, suddenly turned into Einstein’s single world, in which the former antitheses of mass and space are united into an inseparable whole, where geometrical properties are determined by masses.

The rigid antithesis of the old physics—the discontinuous and the continuous, atoms and ether, corpuscles and waves—suddenly appeared before physicists in an indissoluble unity. The energy and momentum of light waves became concentrated in discrete light atoms—photons—while the motion of atoms and electrons was determined by the laws of waves, with all their complexities, diffraction and interference. Every wave—light, sound, elastic—received its reflection in a particle, and conversely.

The age-old opposition of matter and light collapsed with no less certainty. Light, under known conditions, proved to turn into matter, revealing its dialectical, contradictory essence in the material pair of the negative electron and the positive positron.

The interpretation of phenomena in the atomic nucleus and around it required a dialectical partner to such seemingly firm unitary concepts as Newtonian mass and Mayerian energy. Alongside ordinary positive mass, Dirac introduced negative mass and negative energy. The peculiarity and unfamiliarity of intranuclear phenomena recently compelled the same Dirac to speak of the antithesis of ordinary probability, of “negative probability.”²²

The word “dialectics,” under the overwhelming impression of the enumerated phenomena, laws, and concepts, now breaks from the lips of physicists—even those unacquainted with, or alien to, and even hostile to, dialectical materialism. The contradictory, mutually exclusive, opposite character of the phenomena is too obvious.

In the note “On the Question of Dialectics”²³ V. I. Lenin observes that “in any proposition one can (and must), as in a ‘cell’ (‘little cell’), disclose the germs of all the elements of dialectics, thereby showing that dialectics is characteristic of all human knowledge in general.” At the beginning of the note he gives examples of the dialectical unity of opposites: “In mathematics, plus and minus. Differential and integral. In mechanics, action and reaction. In physics, positive and negative …”

electricity. In chemistry, the combination and dissociation of atoms. In the social sciences, class struggle.”

If these examples are compared with the dialectical unities revealed by the new physics: space and matter, corpuscles and waves, light and matter, positive and negative energy, etc., then one cannot fail to notice the following peculiarity. Of course, the pairs plus and minus, action and counteraction, positive and negative electricity, and other examples cited by Lenin are objectively dialectical, but they do not call forth—or have ceased to call forth—in us, in the field of physics, an immediate notion of contradiction and incompatibility. One may put it this way: for us the opposite character of the pairs cited is obvious, but we have ceased at once to notice their unquestionably mutually exclusive nature. Special attention and skill are needed in order to reveal the dialectical contradictoriness and the moving, developing “struggle” in the proposition: “Ivan is a man,” which Lenin gives. The combination of the opposites of the individual and the general in this proposition, and chiefly their struggle, is grasped at once only by a sufficiently subtle dialectical mind. Positive and negative charges in the atom are undoubtedly opposed, but for centuries we have become accustomed to their coexistence, and dialectics in this case has to be reminded of; it is not always noticed at once.

The character of certain of the indicated dialectical unities discovered in the new physics is quite different. Despite the twenty years that have passed since the discovery of the unity of corpuscle and wave, the physicist, and still more the non-physicist, is not in a position to combine in consciousness, in a single image of a stream of electrons or of a light ray, both properties. Meanwhile they are unquestionably one, as is shown by experiment with the diffraction of electrons or by the visual sensation of light at negligible intensities. Contradiction and mutual exclusion are obvious here. The same applies to a considerable extent to the unities: space—matter, light—matter.

The remark just made concerns, however, only the very summits of the new physics. In more detailed and special phenomena their dialectical character is likewise fully traceable, and remarkable examples of dialectical unity are encountered. The study of the liquid state of matter has revealed in it, for example, the coexistence of the undoubted basic properties of a crystal with its lattice and of a gas with its complete disorder. In turn, the physics of crystals has proved to be determined by the struggle of the individual atom and of the collective—the crystal as a whole.

Such cases of dialectical unity, however, in contrast to those indicated earlier, are easily understood by the modern physicist, and in them only attentive analysis reveals the mutual exclusion characteristic of dialectics.

7. METHODS OF INVESTIGATION OF MODERN PHYSICS

What, then, is the reason for the peculiarity of the new physics, for its difficulty of understanding and its unusual contradictoriness? This question should be answered more competently and in more detail by the biologist and the sociologist than by the physicist. On our part only considerations of a very general character are possible.

It is unnecessary to prove that cognition is an important factor in the struggle for existence. Our knowledge is a reflection of the properties and phenomena of the surrounding external objective world, reflections that are imperfect and valid only for certain scales, the scales most essential for man. This knowledge, in the part concerning physics, naturally has, as has already been noted many times, a mechanical character. In passing to entirely unusual domains of the micro- and macroworld, our cognitive apparatus, with its mechanical language, proves gradually more and more unsuitable and unadapted to the objective world.

Just as the objective of a microscope ceases to give correct images when one passes to objects smaller than the wavelength of light, and in the end ceases to image anything at all, so too the human cognitive apparatus, which has grown up under definite conditions, proves unsuitable for entirely different conditions until it is transformed and adapts itself to them.

In what way, then, is cognition in general carried out? From the experimental point of view the answer is obvious and trivial. Man is aided by instruments—microscopes, telescopes, electrometers, the Wilson chamber, and so on—which make it possible to overcome the limitations of the sense organs.

Of course, every instrument introduces a certain complication, inserting itself between the observer and the phenomenon. On the basis of other firm physical knowledge, corrections and interpretations have to be introduced. This has not prevented the use of instruments to study the structure of the atom and of the atomic nucleus, to understand the nature of light, and so forth. True, in the final analysis, the analysis of the influence of the observing instrument on the phenomenon, on the basis of the known laws of physics, led to the so-called “uncertainty relation.” If our information about elementary particles and quantum laws is perfectly precise, then it is impossible to establish simultaneously the exact position of an electron and the exact value of its velocity. If the position of a particle is known absolutely precisely, then its velocity or momentum is completely indeterminate, and conversely. The sizes of the regions of indeterminacy are measured by the quantum constant of action.

The attempts to construct, on the basis of the “uncertainty relation,” a universal, forever infallible and indisputable principle, allegedly substantiating a fundamental indeterminism, are well known. These attempts to canonize the “uncertainty relation” are very reminiscent of the premature enrollment among the infallibles of classical mechanics and mechanism in the broad sense. At the present day the “uncertainty relation” correctly conveys experimental information and is obligatory for physics until such time as the same experience requires its alteration. One may and must draw from the “uncertainty relation” all physical consequences, but for philosophical conclusions about fundamental indeterminism there are still as many grounds as can be obtained, for example, from the irregularity of the weather or another disorderly phenomenon of a statistical character. In connection with these attempts it is appropriate to recall Lenin’s words that “dialectical ma-

materialism insists on the temporary, relative, approximate character of all these milestones in the human knowledge of nature by progressive science»^24. It is more correct and more cautious for the philosopher and the physicist to think that the “uncertainty relation” is one of such transient, approximate milestones of knowledge.

If, within the limits of the “uncertainty relation,” instruments in any case allow man experimentally to investigate phenomena on wholly unusual scales, then how is a theory created of phenomena that are “incomprehensible” to us in the ordinary everyday sense? How, for example, is a theory of matter or of light constructed, one that unites corpuscular and wave properties, although the empirical coexistence of these properties seems to us incomprehensible?

The recipe for constructing theories in such domains is complex, not standard, but at the same time it undoubtedly leads to good results. The basic element in this recipe is a method that may be called the method of mathematical hypothesis or mathematical extrapolation. Let us suppose that from experience it is known that the phenomenon under study depends on a series of variables and constants^1), related to one another approximately by some equation. By rather freely modifying and generalizing this equation, one can obtain other relations between the variables. In this consists the mathematical hypothesis or extrapolation. It leads to expressions that agree with, or diverge from, experience, and in accordance with this it is then either applied further or rejected.

In actual work, mathematical hypothesis is regulated by approximate model representations and by rudiments of classical representations^2). Also of great importance are considerations—essentially quite non-obligatory—of the simplicity and elegance of the resulting expressions. Here, for example, is what Dirac writes in his recent article on the basic works that laid the foundation for wave mechanics—“On the Physical Interpretation of Quantum Mechanics”^25: “In developing the theories of Heisenberg and Schrödinger it soon became apparent that both were based on one and the same mathematical formalism, differing only in the manner of physical interpretation. This formalism is a generalization of the Hamiltonian form of classical dynamics, with linear operators substituted for ordinary algebraic variables, a generalization so natural and elegant that a feeling of confidence is created in the correctness of the foundations of the theory (italics ours.—S. V.).

There is no need to dispute the expediency or legitimacy of the methods described; nothing else has been proposed in a new, unexplored, and incomprehensible to us (in the ordinary sense) domain, and only success, i.e. the agreement of theory with experience, decides the matter. By way of explanation one may cite Dirac’s words, with which one can largely agree: “It should not be surprising,” writes Dirac in the same article, “that formalism estab—

^1) Taken from the customary “classical” representations. This circumstance is extremely important and characteristic. It is possible that the difficulties of the “uncertainty principle” are connected precisely with it.

^2) For example, the “correspondence principle” of quantum and classical relations.

...comes down to the point at which the interpretation becomes clear. Such a situation is the natural consequence of the sharp changes which development has required in certain basic physical conceptions. It is easier to discover the mathematical form necessary for some basic physical theory than its interpretation. This is because the number of things among which one has to choose in discovering a formalism is very limited, since the number of basic ideas in pure mathematics is not very great, whereas in the physical interpretation extremely unexpected things may be found.^26

Thus, mathematics in the new physics has acquired an enormous heuristic, i.e. guiding, significance, which it did not have before, since previously it dealt mainly with a visual representation and reflected the order and harmony of the objective world in clear and ascertained qualitative and quantitative experimental facts.

What does this primary and special role of mathematics in contemporary physical theory mean? Refined experiment, relying on new complex instruments, brings to consciousness the reflection of regions of the world that are completely unusual and alien to the ordinary person. For a visual, model interpretation of the picture, the customary images and concepts are lacking, but logic, with its immense breadth embodied in mathematical forms, remains in force, establishing order and connections in the new, incomprehensible world and opening the possibility of physical predictions. “The category of thought,” Lenin notes in his conspectus of Hegel’s Science of Logic,^27 “is not an instrument of man, but an expression of the law-governed character both of nature and of man.”

And experience and thought thus sometimes lead to the necessity of forming those astonishing dialectical antitheses of which we had to speak above. The laws of dialectics remain in force and have a guiding objective significance also in a new domain with a very distinctive method of cognition. Was it not spontaneous dialectics that guided the theoretician in predicting the existence of the positive electron, negative energy, and negative probability?

8. CONTEMPORARY PHYSICS AND IDEALISM

Around Newton’s doctrine of gravitation there once grew up mystical materialism; the geometry of Lobachevsky and Riemann in the last century was interpreted idealistically as a basis for spiritism, and on the soil of thermodynamics, with its formalism, arose Ostwald’s energetics and empiriocriticism. It is therefore not surprising that around the new physics as well various philosophical idealistic forms are trying to develop, and even with great insistence. In doing so, they quite often proceed not from philosophers but from physicists, and the arguments in favor of idealistic or directly religious conclusions are drawn directly from the results of the new physics. Earlier it was already necessary to mention the indeterministic consequences sometimes extracted from the “uncertainty relation.” General considerations about

indeterminism; Jordan tried on this basis to substantiate free will, while the well-known American experimenter A. Compton went still further, drawing from this in his book The Freedom of Man conclusions about the existence of God.

In 1940, in America, the well-known astrophysicist Stromgren2 published a book entitled The Soul of the Universe, with a restrained but nevertheless favorable preface by another still more famous astrophysicist, Adams. Basing himself on the principles of wave mechanics and the cosmology of the general theory of relativity, Stromgren applies them to the field of biology, attempting on this basis to give a qualitative explanation of the remarkable biological structures and the purposiveness of the organization of the living world. Stromgren applies the same principles to the explanation of the relations between spirit and matter. In the author’s opinion, the most astonishing result of his investigation consists in the fact that individual memory is indestructible, that the essence of all living elements is apparently immortal, and that, in the final analysis, the existence of a world soul is inevitable. It should, however, be noted that even a sympathetic and religiously disposed reader cannot fail to notice the extreme weakness of the biological-philosophical arguments of the astrophysicist Stromgren.

Not always, however, are fideism and idealism, supposedly on the basis of the new physics, proclaimed in such a primitive and unconvincing form. Before us is a new book by A. Eddington: The Philosophy of Physical Science3, outwardly written with brilliance and engagingly, which appeared in 1939. The author’s idealistic inclinations are well known from many of his other works, but here A. Eddington expresses himself especially clearly. Eddington’s idealistic philosophy, which he calls “selective subjectivism,” is, at least outwardly, original: “Selective subjectivism,” writes Eddington, “which is the modern scientific philosophy (!?), has little in common with Berkeleian subjectivism, which, if I understand it correctly, denies any objectivity whatever to the external world. In our view physical phenomena are not wholly subjective, but neither are they wholly objective, and are not a mere mixture of subjective and objective entities and attributes.”4 The physical basis of this philosophy is still the “uncertainty relation” and the theory of relativity. Operating with the concepts of the subjective and the objective, the author apparently sometimes forgets that in a physical experiment the subject may be not a human being but an instrument, a photographic camera, a galvanometer, etc.; and therefore the application of the philosophical terms subjective and objective in many places in the book is an obvious abuse.

From the erroneous premise there further follow certain astonishing conclusions: “We arrive,” says Eddington with complete frankness, “at the position of an idealist, contrasted with materialist philosophy.

Often the objective world is a spiritual world, while the material world is subjective in the sense of ‘selective subjectivism’.”5

The explanation for this idealistic confession is Eddington’s purely natural-philosophical (in the sense of the early nineteenth century) attitude, defended

for about a quarter of a century: “I hold,” he asserts,^32 “that all the fundamental laws and constants in physics can be unambiguously derived from a priori considerations and are therefore wholly subjective.” “All the laws of nature that are usually classified as fundamental can be predicted completely on epistemological grounds.”^33

It may be put this way: Eddington hopes that a sufficiently intelligent man, alone in a dark room, knowing nothing of the external world, can in principle predict all the fundamental physical laws, together with all the universal constants entering into them.

This is not the place for a detailed discussion with Eddington. In any case, he has not succeeded in deriving the world constants from gnoseological considerations. Success would mean, from our point of view, that the human brain contains a perfect reflection of the world, transmitted to it by heredity. We are convinced, however, that knowledge is acquired through prolonged and difficult individual experience and is very far from perfection. The difficulty of understanding the facts of the new physics is an obvious witness to this.

Leaving aside an analysis of Eddington’s physical philosophy, which he, without sufficient grounds, considers the philosophy of modern science, we can in general see, from the few examples cited, the idealistic and mystical haze over contemporary physics just as clearly as in the years when Materialism and Empirio-Criticism was written.

The reasons for this are the same as at the turn of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Idealistic and mystical moods, determined in the first instance by social and class factors, seek support above all in the strongest place—in science—and sometimes seem to find it. The failure of the revolution of 1905 led in Russia to decadent, idealistic, and mystical currents even among socialists. It was they who chiefly formed the circle of adherents of empirio-criticism in Russia, and it was at them that the crushing arrows of Lenin’s book were mainly directed. The social situation in the West before the Second World War provided no less favorable soil for idealism.

To these factors, lying outside physics,^1 are added causes for which physicists themselves are to blame. The fault is still ignorance or misunderstanding of dialectical materialism. In our day, the mechanical worldview has become a museum antiquity in physics (although there are still some who like to dress up now and then in this ancient costume), but in the West they are only beginning to suspect that materialism need not be mechanical, that nature is dialectical in everything. To a certain extent, this is apparently spoken of in part by the book of Eddington’s antagonist, James Jeans, Physics and Philosophy, which appeared in 1942.^34 Unfortunately, I know it only from numerous reviews; but in any case, despite Jeans’s numerous idealistic twists, one cannot fail to note the following conclusion of the book: “We can draw no positive conclusion with regard to this, for example, that materialism is dead, or that determinism is erroneous; we can only say that determi-

nism and freedom, matter and materialism, must receive a new definition in the light of our new scientific knowledge.” To this conclusion, which in essence sounds plainly materialist, we can only add that the new definition of matter and materialism of which Jeans speaks was given by Lenin in his book.

Belatedly, but Western physicists will have to learn dialectical materialism.

9. V. I. LENIN AND SOVIET PHYSICS

V. I. Lenin encountered physics not only in the philosophical arena. The creator of the socialist state inevitably could not pass by physics as the foundation of technology.

Well known is V. I. Lenin’s initiative and his special interest in such questions as the investigation of the Kursk magnetic anomaly and the plan for the electrification of the Soviet Union, which in their implementation rested upon physics. The technical reconstruction of the entire country from top to bottom was impossible without a sound physical foundation, and it is by no means accidental that at the very beginning of the revolution, in the midst of the civil war, at a moment when industry was in an exceptionally grave condition, large physical research institutes in Moscow and Petrograd were established by the Soviet government before all others. These physical centers trained many thousands of scientific workers, who over two decades formed a solid, uninterrupted physico-technical front of our country—in the Red Army, in factories, in higher education, in special institutes.

The Great Patriotic War, unprecedented in the scale and intensity of the struggle against a brutalized enemy, served as the most severe test for everything created during the Soviet years, including our physics and physical technology.

Soviet technical physics, sown by Lenin, withstood severe trials. Traces of this physics are everywhere—on the airplane, in the tank, on the submarine and battleship, in artillery, in the hands of our radio operator and range finder, in the refinements of camouflage. The far-seeing unification of theoretical heights with concrete technical tasks, steadily carried out in Soviet physical institutes, fully justified itself in the terrible years we have lived through. Like Lenin, who united in himself the abstract heights of dialectical philosophy with the everyday practice of revolutionary struggle, the Soviet scientist learned not to separate his theoretical aspirations from the tasks of life and of the Soviet state. This was one of the important factors that determined our steadfastness and our victories.

Immeasurable, inexhaustible are the depths of the phenomena that are gradually revealed before the physicist in the world both great and small. Boundless, accordingly, are the possibilities of technology, resting on old and new physics and directed toward the benefit and development of the human being of the new society.

In this expanse Soviet physics has firmly taken the Leninist-Stalinist path of the indissoluble connection between theory and practice and dialectical materialism.

Ahead of our science lie immense, noble, and grateful tasks and, we hope, a glorious future.

REFERENCES

1. V. I. Lenin, Materialism and Empirio-Criticism, p. 169, 1939.
2. V. I. Lenin, Philosophical Notebooks, p. 182, 1934.
3. P. Duhem. Introduction à la mécanique chimique, p. 88, 1898.
4. Lord Kelvin, Nineteenth Century Clouds over the Dynamical Theory of Heat and Light, Phil. Mag., 2, 1, (1901).
5. V. I. Lenin, Materialism and Empirio-Criticism, p. 170, 1939.
6. V. I. Lenin, ibid., p. 169.
7. V. I. Lenin, ibid., p. 172.
8. V. I. Lenin, ibid., p. 173.
9. V. I. Lenin, ibid., p. 190.
10. V. I. Lenin, ibid., pp. 204, 205.
11. V. I. Lenin, ibid., p. 201.
12. V. I. Lenin, ibid., pp. 192, 193.
13. V. I. Lenin, ibid., p. 186.
14. V. I. Lenin, ibid., p. 202.
15. N. A. Umov, Collected Works, vol. III, p. 70, 1916.
16. N. A. Umov, ibid., p. 408 ff.
17. V. I. Lenin, Materialism and Empirio-Criticism, p. 175.
18. V. I. Lenin, ibid., p. 175.
19. V. I. Lenin, ibid., p. 211.
20. V. I. Lenin, ibid., p. 207.
21. V. I. Lenin, Philosophical Notebooks, p. 329, 1934.
22. P. Dirac, The Physical Interpretation of Quantum Mechanics, Proc. Roy. Soc., A180, 1942.
23. V. I. Lenin, Philosophical Notebooks, pp. 325–328, 1934.
24. V. I. Lenin, Materialism and Empirio-Criticism, p. 177.
25. P. Dirac, The Physical Interpretation of Quantum Mechanics, Proc. Roy. Soc., A180, p. 1, 1942.
26. P. Dirac, ibid., p. 3.
27. V. I. Lenin, Philosophical Notebooks, p. 92.
28. C. Strömgren, The Soul of the Universe, Philadelphia, 1940.
29. A. Eddington, The Philosophy of Physical Science, 1939.
30. A. Eddington, ibid., p. 27.
31. A. Eddington, ibid., p. 69.
32. A. Eddington, ibid., p. 64.
33. A. Eddington, ibid., p. 57.
34. Sir James Jeans, Physics and Philosophy, 1942.

1. Report at the General Meeting of the Academy of Sciences of the USSR, February 14, 1944, in Moscow. ↩