LENIN AND THE PHILOSOPHICAL PROBLEMS OF MODERN PHYSICS*)

S. I. Vavilov

I

V. I. Lenin’s book Materialism and Empirio-Criticism was published in Moscow forty years ago, in 1909, in the grim epoch of reaction after the defeat of the revolution of 1905–1907. In those years, more densely than ever before in the history of the Russian intelligentsia, there arose the fog of idealism, mysticism, and God-seeking. The appearance of V. I. Lenin’s book, directed against all forms of reaction, was an event of enormous significance, for it defended the science and philosophy of dialectical materialism against the onslaught of reactionary idealist philosophy, brilliantly developed materialist doctrine, affirmed the power of human knowledge, and armed scientists with a new scientific method for the study of nature.

The content of this classical work is revealed ever more significantly and fully as the epoch of its appearance recedes from us into the depths of history. More and more clearly, vividly, and distinctly there stands forth the living, integral doctrine of dialectical materialism developed in V. I. Lenin’s work. From Lenin’s book the whole Soviet country and, to an ever greater degree, the progressive intelligentsia of the entire world are now learning dialectical and historical materialism.

Lenin’s book has had and continues to have special significance for natural science as well. I. V. Stalin calls V. I. Lenin’s book “a materialist generalization of everything important and essential among the acquisitions—

) Pravda*, May 12, 1949.

...with science and, above all, with natural science over an entire historical period, from the death of Engels to the appearance of Lenin’s book Materialism and Empirio-criticism (Short Course of the History of the CPSU(b), p. 98).

V. I. Lenin devoted great attention in his book to questions of physics. The reason for this lay in the profound connection of the new physics with philosophy, in the attempts of bourgeois idealist philosophers to draw idealist conclusions from the discoveries of physics and from the new theories created to explain these discoveries.

The fifth chapter of the book—“The Recent Revolution in Natural Science and Philosophical Idealism”—is wholly devoted to epistemological problems connected with the new physics. V. I. Lenin indicates at the same time the limits within which physics is considered in his book: “It goes without saying that, in examining the question of the connection between one school of the recent physicists and the revival of philosophical idealism, we are far from intending to deal with the special doctrines of physics. We are interested exclusively in the epistemological conclusions drawn from certain definite propositions and generally known discoveries... Moreover, among the physicists there are already various trends, definite schools are taking shape on this basis. Our task, therefore, is limited to presenting clearly what the essence of the divergence among these trends is and what relation they bear to the basic lines of philosophy.” (Works, vol. 14, p. 239.)

Lenin’s thoughts on physics and on the philosophical meaning of its discoveries and achievements, concentrated in Materialism and Empirio-criticism, illuminated with remarkable clarity and depth those dark recesses and windings of the new physics in which idealism of various kinds tried to hide. Lenin’s work dispelled the fog, introduced at the beginning of our century by certain philosophizing physicists and philosophers who attempted to resurrect idealism by means of a false interpretation of physical facts revealed by electronics and by the discovery of radioactivity.

In Materialism and Empirio-criticism Lenin subjected to analysis the methodological difficulties encountered by physicists at the beginning of the twentieth century in explaining newly discovered phenomena. Their interpretation in the spirit of idealism led to a crisis in physics. The path indicated by Lenin for overcoming the crisis consisted in mastering dialectical materialism.

II

The end of the nineteenth century coincided chronologically with the epoch of the most decisive break in classical physics in its entire centuries-long history. The proposition concerning the invariability of the mass of bodies in their motion proved erroneous—mass increases as velocity increases. At the same time, quite unexpectedly for physicists, the fallacy of the postulate of classical physics concerning the continuity of motion and action was revealed. The quantum features of phenomena were discovered. An entirely new epoch of physics began.

For a long time the physicist, in his basic concepts and representations, relied above all on ordinary experience. The world of small magnitudes, the internal structure of matter, were conceived in the image and likeness of the world of objects familiar to us. This was the chief, supposedly “self-evident,” postulate of the physics of former times. It was assumed that, with the broadest and most general laws and concepts, the “classical” physicist could go as deeply as he wished in the study of nature. The improvement of the means of observation, new methods of experimental physics, and a more careful and profound study of phenomena revealed, however, sharp deviations in these phenomena from the customary, classical scheme.

Among the physicists themselves, who were discovering new regularities but had been educated in the traditions of classical physics, bewilderment and perplexity prevailed in this connection for a long time. Physicists did not surrender without a fight even a single step in the old, customary fortress of classical physics. And yet this fortress fell, and now, apparently, it has no longer any, or almost any, defenders among physicists.

Lenin’s Materialism and Empirio-Criticism was written in 1908, at the very height of the struggle in physics, in the first years of the development of the new, quantum and relativistic, physics. This book was written in response to numerous attempts by philosophers and philosophizing physicists to use the new physical facts for the resurrection of idealism. The ground for this had been prepared by the philosophy of the physicist Mach and his school. On this soil there spread widely the assertions that the facts of the new physics supposedly proved the “dematerialization” of matter. The Machists referred to the new physics, which, in their opinion, had “refuted” materialism. “The fundamental idea of the school of new physics under consideration,” wrote V. I. Lenin, “is the denial

1*

of objective reality, given to us in sensation and reflected by our theories, or doubt as to the existence of such a reality” (p. 290).

This idealism was advantageous to the ruling classes of bourgeois society, and among the scholarly intelligentsia many knew no other materialism than vulgar, mechanistic, metaphysical materialism.

In his book V. I. Lenin indicated the way out of the crisis in which physics found itself. Lenin’s distinction between the philosophical and the physical concept of matter provided the key to resolving the crisis in physics. “... The sole ‘property’ of matter with whose recognition philosophical materialism is bound up,” he wrote, “is the property of being an objective reality, of existing outside our consciousness” (p. 247). The moving immutable masses of classical physics are by no means the only possible kind of matter, and mechanistic materialism is not the only form of materialism.

Lenin pointed out that the error of Machism consists in ignoring the distinction between metaphysical materialism and dialectical materialism. The recognition of any immutable elements, of the “immutable essence” of things, and the like, is metaphysical, i.e. anti-dialectical, materialism. Lenin emphasized: “... Dialectical materialism insists on the approximate, relative character of every scientific proposition concerning the structure of matter and its properties, on the absence of absolute boundaries in nature, on the transformation of matter in motion from one state into another, which, from our point of view, is apparently irreconcilable with it, etc.” (p. 248).

This most important conclusion of Lenin’s from the foundations of the dialectical-materialist world outlook has decisive and guiding significance for us with respect not only to the physics of the beginning of our century, but also to the physics of our own day. Lenin insistently points out in his book that all immutable substances are only the product of ignorance of dialectics, and formulates the well-known proposition concerning the inexhaustibility of the electron and the atom.

V. I. Lenin revealed with complete clarity those blind alleys and abysses into which the physicist or philosopher inevitably falls when he strays into the domain of idealism or tries to trudge along the old paths of mechanistic materialism.

III

The discoveries of the new physics at the end of the nineteenth and the beginning of the twentieth century proved to be only the prelude to what has unfolded in the field of physics before our eyes.

I have neither the opportunity nor the intention here to set forth the remarkable stages in the history of physics in the twentieth century. I shall confine myself only to listing certain fundamental new facts that undoubtedly have the most profound significance in principle: the structure of atomic nuclei, atoms, and molecules is determined by distinctive integral quantum laws; the forces that hold together the constituent parts of the nucleus (neutrons and protons) have a special nature, still not clarified, differing from electromagnetic and gravitational forces; light possesses both wave and corpuscular properties; the particles of matter, like light, have a dual, corpuscular and wave nature; the variety of known kinds of elementary particles of matter is becoming ever richer, an example of which may be the spectrum of varytrons discovered by Alikhanov; the emission of photons by particles of matter occurs statistically, in a disorderly fashion; particles of matter can be transformed into light and conversely.

Such a list might lead a physicist of the nineteenth century into stupefaction. The facts of the new physics still frighten anyone—physicist or non-physicist—who is encountering them for the first time. Is not the unity of the corpuscular and wave properties of matter absurd? Is it conceivable to combine the statistical chaos of corpuscles and the strict regularity of waves? How can light be transformed into matter? Yet these facts cannot frighten a physicist who stands firmly on the ground of dialectical materialism. Above all, it is precisely the unexpectedness, the “strangeness,” of the system of the world as it reveals itself that is one of the serious arguments in favor of the objectivity of this world. In idealistic philosophical constructions, from Schelling to Eddington, it was assumed that the world could be comprehended by the reflection of a physicist and philosopher, even if they were locked in a dark room. In this idealistic world everything is “provided for,” everything corresponds to thought, for the laws into this world, as the idealists assert, are introduced by thought itself. A world with unexpected properties violates such idealistic “harmony.”

The intra-atomic world has proved to be essentially different from the everyday model. Our concepts must be changed, adapted to this.

opened before us. These concepts, if one applies to them Lenin’s remark in Philosophical Notebooks, “must likewise be trimmed, broken off, flexible, mobile, relative, mutually connected, united in opposites, in order to embrace the world.” (V. I. Lenin, Philosophical Notebooks, pp. 121–122.)

Have physicists managed to approach in precisely this way the new manifestation of the dialectic of nature that has opened before us? Physics in the West still remains in a state of crisis. Scientists in the West cannot overcome this crisis, since, with a few exceptions, they have been unable to take up the positions of dialectical materialism. In the West, attempts at an idealistic interpretation of the data of contemporary physics still continue.

Methodological difficulties in physics arise from the necessity, in studying the world of atoms, of using the entire arsenal of classical physics, i.e., the concept of the particle-body, of velocity, of force, and so forth.

It is clear, of course, that if a stream of light or a stream of electrons simultaneously possesses the properties of a disorderly succession of particles and the features of regular waves, then light and electrons cannot in reality be either particles or waves, but must be some dialectical formation, “united in opposites,” which can be scientifically and precisely defined only from the standpoint of dialectical materialism.

Meanwhile the contemporary physicist is compelled to use almost the entire arsenal of concepts connected with the particle and the wave, and, as a result of the combination of experimental facts, willy-nilly arrives at the notorious uncertainty relation, over which so many lances have been broken. What we have before us is by no means a philosophical riddle, but one of the expressions of the inapplicability of the conceptions of the ordinary world to the subtle properties of matter and light.

Does such unsuitability of the “classical” conceptions in the domain of atomic phenomena signify a limitation of our knowledge and doubt as to the possibility of further progress in the knowledge of nature? By no means. In the period when classical physics held sway, it was taken as self-evident that every correct physical theory must necessarily correspond to a mechanical model. The new physics has revealed to us a circle of phenomena for which it has not been possible to construct a mechanical model. Can we, therefore, not

…to construct physical theories for phenomena of this kind? Undoubtedly. Examples of this are found in the theory of relativity and in quantum mechanics. How, then, are such theories constructed? This is a complex path of combining experimental data, mathematical hypotheses and extrapolations, and the cautious qualitative application of classical conceptions and models. Thus, with enormous success, the new physics has already been created for almost half a century, constantly developing, becoming more complex, improving, and no limit to its development is visible or possible.

The development of physics confirms the profound correctness of the proposition set forth in Comrade Stalin’s work On Dialectical and Historical Materialism. “... Marxist philosophical materialism,” writes Comrade Stalin, “proceeds from the fact that the world and its laws are fully knowable, that our knowledge of the laws of nature, tested by experience and practice, is reliable knowledge having the significance of objective truths, that there are no unknowable things in the world, but only things not yet known, which will be disclosed and known by the forces of science.” (Questions of Leninism, p. 543.)

In our epoch a decisive struggle is taking place between advanced democracy and imperialist reaction. In this struggle the bourgeoisie and its ideologists make use of all forms of idealism, mysticism, and so forth.

The literature of the capitalist countries has, over the last decade, provided countless examples of the deliberate use of facts and theories of the new physics, chemistry, astronomy, and other sciences to warm over various modifications of idealism and even of undisguised mysticism.

Soviet physics, like all Soviet science, has long since entered into the life of the Soviet state, directing all its forces to the service of the native country, to the satisfaction of the demands of the great cause of building communist society.

Soviet physicists base their work on the worldview of dialectical materialism, raised to the highest level by the brilliant works of Lenin and Stalin. But one must not close one’s eyes to the fact that among some of our physicists idealist survivals still persist, supported chiefly by an uncritical reception of the literature of the capitalist countries.

Our urgent task is, by means of merciless criticism and self-criticism, to struggle against these survivals. Their harmful influence is great. In the struggle against them, considerably greater activity is needed on the part of physicists than there has been up to now.

The task of Soviet physicists is to use the dialectical materialism of Marx—Engels—Lenin—Stalin as a mighty progressive weapon in the field of physics as well. Soviet physics must grow in breadth and depth, in order to satisfy the demands placed upon science by the epoch of the building of communism.