Chronicle

In the Commission on the History of Physical and Mathematical Sciences of the USSR Academy of Sciences

At the meeting of the Commission on the History of Physical and Mathematical Sciences on March 4, a report was heard by Prof. Ya. G. Dorfman: “On William Gilbert’s De Magnete.”

At the threshold of the seventeenth century (1600), there appeared in England, in Latin, the celebrated work of the outstanding physician and physicist William Gilbert (1540–1603), On the (Natural) Magnet, Magnetic Bodies, and the Great (Natural) Magnet—the Earth; a New Physiology, Demonstrated by Many Arguments and Experiments.

This book went through no fewer than eight editions over the course of the next 35 years—in London, Amsterdam, Ferrara, Stettin, and Frankfurt—thus making its way through almost all of Western Europe.

Gilbert’s treatise is not only a fundamental scientific work; at the same time it is a fighting declaration of resolute struggle against “well-read clowns, grammarians, sophists, chatterers, and all this dull-witted rabble.” It is the first manifesto of experimental science of modern times, “which derives knowledge not only from books, but from things themselves.” “In discovering secret things and investigating hidden causes, more solid foundations are obtained from reliable experiments and demonstrated arguments than from plausible conjectures and the opinions of ordinary philosophical speculators.” Thus William Gilbert proclaimed the ideas of the Novum Organum twenty years before Francis Bacon. It is not without reason that Gilbert writes that “modern philosophers wander as if in darkness; they must be awakened and taught to use things themselves, to deal with things.”

The immediate subject of Gilbert’s investigation is the magnetic properties of bodies. He set himself the task of critically testing everything that had been written about magnetism. He notes that magnetic phenomena were discovered by practitioners—metallurgists—during the smelting of iron, but that their genuine empirical knowledge was shrouded in countless fables and speculations. And so Gilbert, step by step, clears the question of all these erroneous assertions, verifying them by means of painstaking, ingenious, and very delicate experiments for that time. Thus, on the basis of iron filings, Gilbert gradually created the firm foundations of a phenomenological doctrine of ferromagnetism. He was the first to discover what we call a magnetic field, and he gave the first outline of a graphical method for representing it by means of lines of force—a method subsequently brought to perfection by Faraday. For the first time in physics, Gilbert applied the principle of similarity, using in his experiments a magnetized sphere as a model of the terrestrial globe. By these experiments he established for the first time that the Earth is a natural magnet.

For the first time Gilbert clarified the difference between electrostatic and magnetostatic phenomena, and to him belongs even the very term “elec-”

... “electrical properties.” The magnetic and electrical instruments he first invented were the prototypes of our magnetometers, electroscopes, and electrometers. Thus, Gilbert is the universally recognized founder of the doctrine of electricity and magnetism.

Relying on his discovery of the magnetism of the terrestrial globe, Gilbert extrapolated it to other celestial bodies and attributed to magnetic forces the role which, as Newton subsequently showed, belongs to gravitation. At the same time Gilbert declared himself an ardent adherent of Copernicus, treating his opponents’ scholastic doctrine of the motion of the heavens as “old wives’ tales.” Thus Gilbert’s work De Magnete, the first vivid propaganda for the Copernican system, was a forerunner of Galileo’s famous Dialogues. It was not without reason that Galileo studied, repeated, and verified Gilbert’s experiments and declared himself his ardent admirer and adherent.

At the same time, it was Galileo who noted the principal shortcoming of all Gilbert’s investigations—their exclusively qualitative character: “He ought to have been somewhat more of a mathematician.” “But this in no way diminishes the glory of the first observer,” Galileo adds. “I revere the first inventor of the boat, although in all probability his instrument was crudely made and still more crudely sounded.”

While attacking scholastic philosophy with exceptional sharpness, Gilbert nevertheless, in his attempts at philosophical generalization, is marked by a certain naïveté and inconsistency. He lacks even a trace of the depth of philosophical thought of Fr. Bacon. His fascination with magnetism led Gilbert to the assertion that the whole world is animated and that this soul, or god, is nothing other than magnetic force diffused throughout the entire universe.

This “magnetic philosophy” of Gilbert later evoked extremely caustic remarks from Bacon.

Apparently, it was precisely these caustic words of Bacon that caused Gilbert’s significance on the part of many philosophers and historians of philosophy to be underestimated. Thus, for example, Gilbert’s name is entirely absent from G. F. Aleksandrov’s History of Western European Philosophy. Meanwhile, while giving Fr. Bacon his due as the founder of the philosophy of English materialism, historians of philosophy should, in the speaker’s opinion, at last assign a proper place to Gilbert as well, for it must be acknowledged that Gilbert’s remarkable work De Magnete, like Bacon’s Novum Organum, awakened seventeenth-century philosophical thought from its age-long slumber and gave a decisive impetus to the development of materialism in Western Europe.

On March 25, 1947, in Leningrad, under the chairmanship of Academician S. I. Vavilov, a regular meeting of the Commission on the History of the Physical and Mathematical Sciences of the Academy of Sciences of the USSR was held.

Prof. K. K. Baumgardt of Leningrad State University delivered a report entitled “On the Activity of E. Kh. Lenz at St. Petersburg University.”

The speaker began his communication with an account of Academician E. Kh. Lenz’s predecessors in the chair of physics of the Faculty of Physics and Mathematics at St. Petersburg University. There were two of them. When the university was founded there was only one chair of physics and chemistry together, with two professors attached to it. The first professor of physics was Nikolai Prokof’evich Shcheglov. After completing his education at the Pedagogical Institute, Shcheglov, having attracted attention by his talent, was engaged to teach at the university, where he did indeed display outstanding literary abilities. He was one of the most popular professors at the university. Later he wrote a course in physics and a very large number of articles and several books on various questions of natural science and agriculture. He was elected a corresponding member of the Academy of Sciences and was a full, and sometimes an honorary, member of many scientific societies. N. P. Shcheglov died in 1831.

His successor was N. T. Shcheglov—a figure far paler than the first Shcheglov. He wrote two courses in physics; one of them was for military educational institutions. Later he left the university and taught at the Lyceum and in military educational institutions.

A new era in the activity of the Department of Physics and of the entire Faculty of Physics and Mathematics began when a separate Department of Physics and Physical Geography was organized and Acad. E. Kh. Lenz was elected ordinary professor to this department (in December 1835). For some time N. T. Shcheglov still continued to be listed at the university as second professor of physics.

The speaker then gave biographical information about Lenz. He was born in 1804 and studied at Dorpat University, which he did not complete. From 1823 Lenz was on a circumnavigation voyage as the physicist of the expedition. Here he first displayed his remarkable qualities as an experimenter. Upon returning from the expedition and defending his doctoral dissertation, Lenz came to Petersburg. In 1828 he was elected adjunct of the Academy of Sciences, in 1830 extraordinary academician, and in 1834—ordinary academician. All his subsequent scientific activity took place in the St. Petersburg Academy of Sciences.

The scientific work of E. Kh. Lenz earned him the reputation of one of the best experimenters of his time and of a profound thinker. But E. Kh. Lenz was not only a major scholar; he was also an unusually gifted teacher and an outstanding organizer. The speaker noted those commissions and committees in which E. Kh. Lenz worked, and the educational institutions in which Lenz taught, and characterized in detail the activity of E. Kh. Lenz at the university, where he taught for more than 28 years, was dean of the faculty for more than 20 years, several times performed the duties of rector, and at the end of his activity was the first elected rector under the new Statute of 1863.

In conclusion, summing up Lenz’s work at the university, the speaker indicated that the flourishing which began in the activity of the Faculty of Physics and Mathematics in the 1860s was to a considerable degree due to the energy and organizational talent of Acad. E. Kh. Lenz.

Acad. S. I. Vavilov and full member of the Academy of Pedagogical Sciences B. E. Raikov spoke on the report.

S. I. Vavilov, noting the exceptional importance of Acad. E. Kh. Lenz as a teacher who trained an enormous number of students—future academicians and professors—as a remarkable investigator who was unusually strict toward all his experiments and conclusions, pointed out the desirability of illuminating the activity of E. Kh. Lenz first in collaboration with Acad. Parrot and then with Acad. Jacobi, since, in S. I. Vavilov’s opinion, E. Kh. Lenz has every reason to be ranked among the host of classical physicists who laid the foundations of electromagnetism, following in the steps of Oersted and Ampère.

Then S. I. Vavilov drew the attention of those present to the fact that in the 1860s–1870s many students and university staff worked in the physical laboratory of the Academy of Sciences (this is attested, in particular, by the notes of Khvolson), and thus the physical laboratory of the Academy of Sciences played the role of an experimental base for St. Petersburg University. In S. I. Vavilov’s opinion, it would be no bad thing to return again to this tradition, now forgotten, and to abandon the practice currently taking place when, in the absence of sufficient monetary resources, scientific personnel, and equipment, each institution strives nevertheless to create its own scientific-research base, despite the fact that in the immediate neighborhood of the given institution there is an excellent scientific-research base in another institution which could successfully be used.

B. E. Raikov reported that he had had occasion to examine the archive of the Expedition for the Preparation of Instructional Aids, in whose activity N. P. Shcheglov took part,

who played a major role in organizing teaching aids for physics; moreover, this role of N. P. Shcheglov’s remained unilluminated in print. In particular, N. P. Shcheglov organized portable physics cabinets, with which it was intended to supply all the gymnasia of that time, but N. P. Shcheglov’s premature death interrupted his activity and prevented the realization of his plans.

As for the activity of Academician E. Kh. Lenz, one interesting point must be noted in his biography: his polemic with the Moscow professor M. G. Pavlov. In this polemic E. Kh. Lenz appeared as an experimentalist who demands that experience be placed at the foundation of science, whereas Prof. Pavlov tried to defend the principle of speculation over experience and strove to prove the correctness of his positions by various sophistical devices.

M. Radovsky