THE CREATIVE PATH OF ACADEMICIAN P. P. LAZAREV

T. P. Kravets1

The leader and creator of the Moscow school of physicists, P. N. Lebedev, often told his pupils about the famous “colloquium” that worked under the direction of his teacher in Strasbourg, August Kundt. At the same time he constantly lamented that such an enterprise was still beyond our powers. But in 1902, at the urging of his senior pupils, he made an attempt to organize such a scientific colloquium—now such meetings are more often called seminars—at the Moscow Physical Laboratory (the Physical Institute had not yet been completed at that time). The colloquium immediately succeeded and captivated both its chairman and the other participants. As the first experiment of this kind at Moscow University, it interested representatives of other specialties as well; among its visitors at various times one may name K. A. Timiryazev, B. K. Mlodzeevsky (a mathematician), N. N. Luzin, and others. And so, in the very first days of the colloquium’s existence, a young man who did not belong to P. N.’s staff began to appear at its meetings, with the chairman’s permission. He did not take part in the discussions, which in general were always very lively, but listened eagerly to all the presentations. When attempts were made to draw him into private conversations on scientific topics, he readily met them halfway and astonished everyone by his phenomenal memory, his already vast erudition, his modesty bordering on shyness, and his fervent faith in every printed word. This was the young physician, and later the great scientist-physicist, P. P. Lazarev.

At that time P. P. was interested chiefly in the physiology of the sense organs. He had just completed his first two works: on the independence of the auditory impression from the phase difference between the harmonic components of a sound, and on the interaction of the organs of hearing and vision. Much later, probably in 1913 or 1914, he demonstrated the following experiment at his colloquium: in a dark room an electromagnetic tuning fork is sounding, producing a sound of constant intensity. At that moment a small lamp is lit. At the instant of its flash everyone in the auditorium distinctly hears an increase (of course, an apparent one) in the sound.

In the days of his youth P. P. bowed before Helmholtz, rendering him honors hardly short of divine. Among Russian scholars he revered K. A. Timiryazev and valued extremely highly his classic works on the action of light on chlorophyll.

P. P. was one of the oldest Russian physicists. In age, among those who remained alive, he occupied, it seems, the twelfth place. But death does not observe a strict order. He was born in 1878 and in 1901 completed the course of the medical faculty of Moscow University. Apparently, it was precisely his interests in the physiology and physics of the sense organs that led him to the university clinic of ear diseases. The latter had been organized with funds donated by a well-known benefactress of that time, Bazanova. The clinic was equipped, for its time, with great luxury and possessed a rich collection of physical, chiefly acoustical, instruments. P. P. began his scientific career in the post of head of this cabinet.

Then our acquaintance with P. P. was interrupted for about two years: he went to Strasbourg, and I—to the Japanese war. When I returned and again obtained a place to work in P. N. Lebedev’s laboratory—already in the new Physical Institute of the University, in the famous Lebedev basement—I had to work with P. P. in one room on the basement floor of the institute tower. He was already finishing his work on the photochemical bleaching of dyes. Here, as is known, by very precise physical measurements, highly characteristic of the Lebedev school, he succeeded in proving the exact applicability of the van ’t Hoff law to the reaction of decolorizing dyes. But although the execution of the work has the Lebedev style, the subject itself was entirely alien to our common teacher. It clearly belonged to P. P. himself, who brought it here from the sphere of his physiological interests, partly, perhaps, from acquaintance with the above-mentioned works of K. A. Timiryazev on the assimilation of light energy by the chlorophyll of plants.

In 1907, as is known, the first Mendeleev congress took place (in Petersburg, at the end of the year). At this congress P. P. showed a demonstration arrangement making it possible, under the conditions of a lecture experiment, to show the bleaching of cyanine simultaneously in rays of different spectral regions.

At that time he himself was working on a new subject—on the temperature jump at the boundary of a solid body in a gas of extreme rarefaction. In contrast to his first physical work, this work was suggested, unquestionably, by P. N. Lebedev. Its origin was as follows. P. N. published a work in which he showed that one can increase the sensitivity of a thermoelement by placing it in the best attainable vacuum; incidentally, since then such thermoelements of factory manufacture have come into general use, but it occurs to no one to call them by the name of their direct author: instruments released for sale bring benefit—and even glory—not to the one who invented them, but to the one who first patented them... The idea

such thermoelements was connected with certain subtle physical considerations that could not but occupy a pupil of P. N. Lebedev’s Kundt school. After all, it was Kundt himself, and no one else, who first proved that, in the ranges of low gas pressures accessible in his time, their internal friction and thermal conductivity do not depend on pressure. When extrapolated to ultravacua, this property leads to absurd consequences: a complete vacuum should behave in the same way as any gas at atmospheric pressure. It is clear that at extreme rarefactions some new circumstances must appear; and theory indicates them—for internal friction, in the slip of the gas at a solid boundary, and for thermal conductivity, in the temperature jump at that same boundary. Both of these facts were tested in P. N. Lebedev’s laboratory: P. P. Lazarev’s investigation was devoted to the temperature jump (subsequently it became his master’s dissertation), while A. K. Timiryazev’s excellent work dealt with the peculiarities of internal friction. Both of these topics arose from the need to give a theoretical basis for the increased sensitivity of thermoelements when their bulbs were evacuated. Fairness also requires pointing out that P. N.’s own interest in questions of high rarefaction undoubtedly arose in connection with his major work on light pressure, where success was determined to a considerable extent by the fact that, by means of an ingenious device, P. N. succeeded in carrying the rarefaction somewhat farther than his predecessors in this kind of research.

P. P. Lazarev’s own investigation is, in Lebedev’s manner, simple and transparent in its method: in a regulated vacuum, two metal mirrors are placed at a small distance from one another and parallel to one another—the upper one at a higher temperature, the lower one at a lower temperature. Between them a thermoelement is moved, measuring the temperature of the gas at the point where it is located, and also, when in direct contact with a mirror, the temperature of the latter. The fact of the temperature jump is established by direct experiment and turns out to be close to the theoretically expected value.

This work, as has been said, was defended by P. P. as a dissertation for the master’s degree. Unfortunately, unlike other works of P. P., it did not have a direct continuation in the work of his pupils; evidently, suggested by P. N., it remained alien to P. P.’s own interests. But when he later became the founder and scientific director of a factory for X-ray apparatus, his close acquaintance with the questions and methods of vacuum physics could not but prove very useful to him.

This, however, happened considerably later. At that time P. P.’s interest in molecular physics drew him deep into statistical methods. I remember that he was then preoccupied with the dream of introducing time into the equations of statistics as an independent variable. If this could be accomplished, thermodynamics would cease to be a science of equili-

systems and the possibility would open up of predicting the course of all thermal processes in time. At times it seemed to P. P. that he was close to solving this fundamental problem. But I do not know that he ever wrote anything on this question afterward.

By this time, parallel with P. P.’s intellectual growth, there had also taken shape the gradual rise of his position in P. N. Lebedev’s laboratory: from a beginning scholar he became a mature scientist; from an outsider admitted to work, he became P. N.’s senior assistant, his right hand and helper in all his undertakings. In particular, P. N. began to entrust to him the entirely independent direction of a certain part of the laboratory’s personnel, down to determining the subject matter of their work. At this time works began to appear in P. N.’s laboratory on statistics, on the rate of propagation of explosive chemical processes, and so forth. This was P. P. Lazarev’s subject matter, which received its full development later.

By this time he himself had returned to his photochemical work, taking up the kinetics of photochemical reactions. But the tranquil course of this work was destined to undergo a series of tragic interruptions.

Few now remember the story of the destruction of Moscow University by the Minister of Public Education, the former professor of Moscow University, Kasso. I shall allow myself to reconstruct this sad page of our cultural history in the readers’ memory.

At the very beginning of 1911 the Ministry of Public Education sent to the higher educational institutions of its department a circular proposing that the presidiums of these institutions take the most energetic measures against the student disturbances then coming to a head, or, as they were then called, “disorders.” In particular, the presidiums were instructed, at the very first gatherings of students, to call the police for assistance. The Presidium of Moscow University (the rector—A. A. Manuilov, the prorector—P. A. Minakov, and the assistant rector—M. A. Menzbir—all now already deceased) rightly considered this circular a violation of university autonomy, which entrusted all concerns for maintaining order in the university to the employees of the university itself, and in this spirit prepared a report to the University Council. The Council agreed with the grounds of the report and authorized the rector to take the appropriate actions. At the subsequent gathering the rector refused the services of the police. Then the minister ordered all three members of the presidium to be removed from their posts. This order provoked a storm of protests at the university. Many members of the Council who had voted to give the presidium the authority not to submit to the ministry’s illegal order considered themselves, equally with the presidium, responsible for all the consequences and submitted their resignations. The movement spread widely: more than 40 university professors submitted their resignations. They were soon joined by numerous “junior instructors” of the university—privat-docents, assistants, and others—although at the University Council they...

were not present, did not use its voice (the subject of constant quarrels between the “professorial” and the “junior” groups of the old academic union), and therefore they were not obliged to bear any moral responsibility for its actions. For many university figures the hours of agonizing hesitation had come. These hesitations were hardly more painful for anyone than for P. N. Lebedev. By that time he was seriously ill (with angina pectoris); only a small part remained of his formerly rather considerable fortune, and at issue was not only his material well-being, but especially the possibility of continuing his scientific work. He had never held any concurrent appointments, had not been connected with any scientific institution outside the university, and if he left the university he would have had to begin anew the construction of the enterprise to which, in Moscow University, he had given almost twenty years of his working life. But he left, sacrificing to civic duty more than any of his comrades and subordinates. P. P. Lazarev also left, of course, and here for the first time the students of P. N.—who in general had always remained far from questions of politics and public activity—had to immerse themselves completely in the task of arranging P. N.’s laboratory on new principles of public support. At that time this meant seeking sympathy among the wealthy bourgeoisie, dissatisfied with the order of things in tsarist Russia. Not everything went smoothly here. I remember one visit to a wealthy, enlightened representative of the Moscow merchant elite, a man who at that time was himself trying to engage in scientific research. The two of us were at his place with P. P. The host received us kindly, expressed full sympathy with the purpose of our visit, and promised to think about what might be undertaken at once. The next day he himself telephoned P. N. and informed him that P. N. Lebedev and his students were being given complete freedom to use instruments from the physics collection of the Moscow Practical Academy of Commercial Sciences. This was the name of one secondary commercial school in which the sons of the wealthy merchant class studied… In its “cabinet” the head of a world-famous school of physics, together with all his collaborators, was being invited to conduct scientific work.

The first failures did not break the spirit of P. P. and of P. N.’s other pupils. But how much nerve and labor it cost all of them to gain an understanding of the scale of the task that had arisen—only the direct participants in these efforts and their closest comrades can clearly imagine. The first steps on the path toward the new arrangement were supported by the Shanyavsky People’s University, which took for P. N.’s laboratory a basement in house No. 20 on Mertvyi Lane on Prechistenka. In the same house, on the upper floor, P. N. Lebedev and P. P. Lazarev settled in two closely situated apartments. Here their intimacy took on the character of close friendship. And, however surprising it may be, in many questions the incomparably high authority for all of us here was not P. N., but our comrade P. P. This was partly explained by the fact that he inspired in P. N. unlimited confidence as a physician, while P. N., as a refined—

a drowning man, would clutch even at a straw... But to a greater degree this was based on the fact that, in arranging all the external aspects of life on a new footing, of all those around P. N. no one did more, of course, than P. P.

P. N. did not live long after all these events. In April 1912 we buried him, honored him with a solemn meeting, published his works, and turned to our everyday work. Lebedev’s colloquium passed under the direction of P. P. to Shanyavsky University. The work of P. N.’s pupils, too, somehow found its place. P. P. himself continued his photochemical work in the laboratory of the Moscow Higher Technical School. Fate arranged yet another interruption for this work. One terrible evening the laboratory assistant of the Technical School telephoned Olga Aleksandrovna Lazareva and informed her, in the most categorical tone, that P. P.’s apparatus had exploded and that in the process one of his eyes had been knocked out, while with the other he could see nothing... Fortunately, the matter proved not to be so terrible: only one eye was injured in the explosion, and the matter was confined to a hemorrhage... I remember our frightened pilgrimage to P. P. at the private surgical clinic of P. A. Postnikov. He recovered rather quickly, but some defect in color vision remained in the injured eye. P. P. himself did not lose heart, and subsequently managed to turn his “mutilation” into a method for investigating certain questions of color vision...

Meanwhile, the matter of public aid to science, expelled from Moscow University, went its own way and yielded rich results. In particular, a splendid institute was built for the physicists, later described by P. P. Everyone knows it—this is the present building of the Physical Institute of the Academy of Sciences. But its opening did not pass off, even on the eve of the revolution, without a certain “scandal.” I shall not here go into a description of this sad event. One must, however, recall with sympathy in connection with it the immortal judgment of Pushkin’s staff-captain: “Sort out who is right and who is to blame, and punish them both.” The subsequent course of events justified P. P. against many accusations, real and imaginary: from the institute he had received he was able, in a short time and under the most threatening external conditions, to create a solid scientific institution with a broad and distinctive range of subjects. Not all of his opponents were granted the same success.

But then the thunder of revolution burst forth. Many scientific workers, at its first peals, became utterly and hopelessly confused: both those who stood for the new order and those who were “on the other side of the barricade.” It was necessary to seek new foundations and new applications for one’s accustomed work, to speak with new people and in a new language. Undoubtedly, one of the very first to find himself in the new situation was P. P. I remember our conversations after a long separation (at that time I was working in Kharkov), which astonished me completely: I was languishing because I could not obtain the one spectrophotometer I needed, while at P. P.’s I saw as many as five or six of them—and they had been obtained already after the revolution. We were all

were brought up on theories of “pure science,” whereas here I saw, on a broad scale, applied themes and practical problems: the matter concerned tasks of camouflage and counter-camouflage. The approach to solving them was entirely scientific and even seemed excessively scientific, given the then more than modest capabilities of the young proletarian republic. But P. P.’s tone was confident and cheerful, and the achievements and possibilities were evident. One had not only to agree with his approach to the matter, but also to learn from him how to take up work in a new way while possessing sufficiently old baggage.

Unfortunately, apart from the aforementioned works on camouflage, P. P. did not after this turn even once to themes of a purely physical character. But he achieved major successes in other fields, and above all in geophysics. Here, in the first place, one should mention his work on the investigation of the Kursk magnetic anomaly.

The history of this question is as follows. The existence of the Kursk magnetic anomaly had been known in science for a long time, but we owe its detailed investigation to the privat-docent, and subsequently professor of Moscow University, E. E. Leist. On his more than modest privat-docent income he traveled every year to the region of the anomaly, hired a cart—also from those same “funds”—and made hundreds of painstaking and highly precise measurements of the magnetic elements. Later, critics blamed Leist for the fact that, while maintaining exaggerated precision in the magnetic measurements, he contented himself with much cruder data on the coordinates of the observation points. Even so, his measurements are the first solid foundation of our knowledge of the Kursk anomaly.

Before the revolution, a detailed investigation of the anomaly brought no other tangible results, apart from excitement on the land market; local landowners grew rich and went broke speculating in their plots of land, and Leist himself asserted that an anomaly of such enormous extent and absolute magnitude could be caused exclusively by the presence of vast deposits of iron. Geologists unanimously maintained—and this must be firmly remembered—that there could be no question of iron in these places. Against the geologists, neither Leist nor the landowners interested in his triumph could object with anything except babble about how in one place they had seen rusty water in a spring, and so on. After the revolution Leist went abroad and died there. Apparently he tried to interest German industrial circles in the Kursk ore. In any case, the map of the anomaly compiled by him fell into the hands of the Germans, and they tried to sell it to L. B. Krasin for some millions of gold marks. L. B. Krasin, incidentally, asked P. P. Lazarev’s opinion on this matter. The latter energetically opposed the German claims and proposed that the map be surveyed anew, at a lower cost.

With this began the work of the grand commission for the investigation of the Kursk anomaly. P. P. for the first time placed this task directly at the service of practical geology, or, more precisely, geological prospecting. The task was as follows: to survey the region of the anomaly—and not only

magnetic, but also by various gravimetric methods—and from the results to determine where and in what quantity the masses causing it, i.e. the iron masses, occur. This problem is very complex, and at first glance even appears hopeless; for, as is known from potential theory, one and the same force field far from the sources can be produced by an infinite variety of sources. The true density of charges, as the Laplace and Poisson equations show, can be determined unambiguously only by measuring the field in the immediate vicinity of the sources. A certain way out of this situation is provided already by considerations not of a mathematical, but of a geological nature. The point is that not every distribution of masses, whether magnetic or material, conceivable mathematically proves probable from the geological point of view. That is why, in certain cases, geologists had to have the decisive word in the commission on the Kursk magnetic anomaly, and into the currency of its reasoning entered horizontal and inclined strata, fractures of strata, buried ridges, and so forth.

Such were the theoretical premises of the commission’s work, which at first were by no means so clear. Then it was necessary to develop a practical methodology for exploration. In this matter, a weighty instruction by Academician A. N. Krylov acquired great importance: he proposed for the commission’s use an instrument employed in naval affairs, much less accurate than Leyst’s instruments, but working incomparably faster. If one recalls the economic and political circumstances of that time, one must regard with the greatest respect the labors of the commission, which managed to obtain a map of anomalies, extending it far beyond the originally proposed limits, to interpret it geologically, to check the calculated data by the results of direct drilling, and, in the end, to present to the Soviet homeland a precisely surveyed iron deposit in the center of the country, two steps from our main coal basin, and, moreover, surpassing in total iron content everything that exists in Europe. This success must forever be associated with the name of P. P. Lazarev.

The geophysical works of P. P. Lazarev are not exhausted by the study of the Kursk magnetic anomaly, but subsequently they never again rose to such dimensions and to such immense practical achievements. We may, however, mention his interesting work on the theory of currents in the terrestrial oceans and the explanation, by changes in the directions of these currents, of climatic changes in various geological epochs. Next follows a series of seismological works, both by P. P. Lazarev himself and by his students. These works, too, are in their totality not without significance. In short, even apart from the Kursk magnetic anomaly, one may speak of P. P. as a geophysicist.

P. P. also worked on the problem of glass and the glassy state. But still we have not touched upon the most important aspect of P. P.’s activity—his work in the field of biophysics. It is quite natural that

he, a physician by training, from his very youngest years pondered the physical and chemical problems arising in the field of physiology and biology in general. We spoke at the beginning of our report about his early works on the physiology of the sense organs. But the main cycle of his works in this field arose later, in connection with Nernst’s theory of nervous excitation. P. P.’s rare ability to infect those around him with his enthusiasm led to the fact that we, his friends—by education not at all physicians or biologists—acquired Loeb’s little book The Dynamics of Living Matter and discussed questions concerning the paths by which excitation spreads in the central nervous system and other similar problems.

P. P. was greatly interested in questions of the psychology of creativity and was very fond of W. Ostwald’s little book Grosse Männer. He was much impressed by Ostwald’s division of the creators of science into “classics” and “romantics.” The former work calmly, in silence and solitude, on their themes, not needing the help of collaborators, completing their thoughts by their own labor, often bestowing upon humanity priceless treasures of thought and experience. The latter work nervously, with strain, not managing to clothe in the flesh of their own work the ideas born in them in tormenting abundance and imperiously demanding that, for the immediate solution of ever newer and newer tasks as they arise, they enlist pupils and collaborators. Our common teacher P. N. Lebedev was undoubtedly such a typical romantic, and P. P. Lazarev followed him along this path. He chose this path consciously, and, I am convinced, with some violence done to his own nature and his early habits. We remember him as a young man, when, striking everyone by his instinctively healthy tastes, he kept to an extremely simple regimen, recognized nothing spicy in food, did not touch even light red wine, and knew only one excess—unceasing work. Somehow it is difficult to connect the image of a “romantic” with these details. But ideas were born in him in multitude, and in the course of his life he drew in many dozens of pupils to develop them, far surpassing his teacher in this respect...

Looking back on this life, lived in a great but difficult epoch, full of labor, under constantly changing conditions, one is struck by the richness and variety of the interests that animated it. In which other among his, among our, contemporaries shall we find such extensive series of works in pure physics, and in physical chemistry, and in geophysics, and in biophysics—works that have left a memory behind them and preserved their effective beginning.

Today we remember with kind words a comrade in scientific work who has departed into eternity. Together with us, his numerous comrades and friends, his still more numerous pupils, and all those who, on the most diverse questions, will have to delve into the enormous legacy left after the deceased, will remember him.

1. Report at the April session of the Academy of Sciences, 1942. ↩