Bibliography

A. G. Stoletov, Collected Works, edited and annotated by Prof. A. K. Timiryazev, vol. II, Popular Lectures and Speeches, Critical and Biographical Notes. State Publishing House for Technical and Theoretical Literature, Moscow—Leningrad, 1941, 431 pp., price 12 rubles 50 kopecks.

The writings of A. G. Stoletov collected in this volume give an idea of his scientific and philosophical views and of his activity as a popularizer and as a person. It is instructive, in reading this volume, to follow how this great scholar—a man of the highest morality in life and in science, strict with himself and with others, and full of inner passion—lived and acted amid the difficult, for a public figure, and gloomy, in the general political sense, times. In his lectures on gases, energy, Kirchhoff, Newton, Kovalevskaya, and especially on Helmholtz, he not only gives a vivid picture of the life, activity, and scientific-philosophical views of these creators of science, but he himself is visible as well, since he is not indifferent to anything. Undoubtedly, his scientific-philosophical views were mechanistic; at the same time—the eighties and nineties of the last century—such views still seemed progressive; however, Maxwell’s electrodynamics had already begun its triumphant march, as had the kinetic theory of gases, revived by it. The significance of these two currents in physics, which led to the abandonment of mechanism and of the phenomenological point of view, was not recognized by A. G. Stoletov, and in his writings one does not sense the foretaste of a new stage in the development of physics. Of course, one cannot see this as a reproach, but for the student and teacher, for whom the reading of this volume would be most instructive, it would have been necessary to have at least notes, and preferably an addition by the editor establishing the relation of classical and mechanical physics—so fully portrayed by A. G. Stoletov—to its subsequent development.

Also noteworthy is the struggle that A. G. Stoletov waged for the organization of science (the article on physical laboratories) and for its loftiness and integrity (the articles on the work of Lyubimov). These are speeches full of passion and fire; the purity and integrity, though sharp in manner, of A. G. Stoletov’s personality stand before us as an instructive example. May this book find a loving reader!

The book is well and carefully produced. It is a pity, nevertheless, that the editor declined to help the young reader in establishing the place and significance of A. G. Stoletov in the historical course of physics.

N. N. Andreev