Posted on February 17, 2012
Dear Mikhail Vasilevich,
Firstly, I want to say how much I enjoyed Vladimir Shiltsev’s article about you in the latest Physics Today magazine. I was pleasantly surprised that a Western magazine would write a favorable article about a Russian! Admittedly it was written by a Russian, and you were well before the Cold War, McCarthy, and all that nonsense which blurred the lines of normality… I will admit that I had known your name – Moscow State is named after you – but to my great shame, I actually knew very little about you beyond that. However, as I read it, and then more about you elsewhere, I felt a strange type of, I don’t know how to say this without sounding weird, but a type of kinship. Your humble roots, your thirst for knowledge, your frankness with authority, your ability to think big – I related to those. I also greatly admire that you were a true scholar – not just a scientist, but a poet, a philosopher…You weren’t a jack of all trades and master of none… The world has had too few people like you, and the world is much poorer because of it. I’m not saying I am like you, in the same league as you, nor that I could be like you, but I sure do miss having people of your ilk in my company or, at least, the world at large.
Your friend from a different era…
http://tswciftc.wordpress.com/2012/02/17/an-open-letter-to-mikhail-lomonosov/
Отклик на статью Владимира Шильцева в Physics Today, Vol.2 February, 2012 Mikhail Lomonosov and the dawn of Russian science http://www.physicstoday.org/resource/1/phtoad/v65/i2/p40_s1?bypassSSO=1
Vladimir Shiltsev is director of the Accelerator Physics Center at Fermilab in Batavia, Illinois.
The chart shown here illustrates the evolving popularities of Gottfried Leibniz, Isaac Newton, and Mikhail Lomonosov—the three key figures of the national enlightenments of Germany, England, and Russia, respectively. The plot shows the frequency of appearances of each man’s last name as a fraction of the sum total of words published in his native language in a given year. By that metric, the three men are the most frequently recurring names among representatives of the natural sciences, and the chart illustrates their unique paths to fame.
Newton (1642–1727) enjoyed enormous recognition during his lifetime, a peak in celebrity during the decade right after his death, and then centuries of posthumous recognition.
Leibniz (1646–1716) rose to fame in more dramatic fashion. Presumably due to having lost the argument with Newton over priority in developing differential calculus, Leibniz went unrecognized for almost 150 years after his death. Not until the second half of the 19th century, when a unified German state was created, did he gain fame. Since then, Leibniz’s prominence in the literature of his native tongue is unrivaled by any other scientist, likely owing to consistent scientific awareness on the part of German society.
Lomonosov (1711–65) rose to prominence via an equally remarkable path. He was posthumously forgotten in the Russian literature for some 40 years but then reemerged in the early 1800s during Russia’s cultural awakening, of which the appearance of renowned author Alexander Pushkin was the climax. Since then, Lomonosov has consistently been the most frequently mentioned scientist in the Russian literature, followed by Dmitri Mendeleyev, creator of the periodic table, and Nobel laureate Ivan Pavlov, pioneer in understanding physiological reflex mechanisms.
Lomonosov’s peaks in popularity during the 1860s and 1950s correspond to publicity campaigns—the most recent initiated by Joseph Stalin to popularize science and technology and to venerate Russia’s scientific heritage. Notably, those brief surges did not change the baseline level of Lomonosov’s popularity. The true value of a person in a nation’s eyes, it would seem, holds steady through the decades and centuries. (Chart produced using Google’s Ngram Viewer. See ref. 10.)
Комментарии (0)