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Tribute to Mandelshtam
Excerpted from Making Waves by Yakov Alpert © 2000 by Yale
University. Reproduced here by permission of, and all rights reserved
by, Yale University
Press.
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Tribute to the Scientific School of L. I. Mandelshtam
We left our homeland, its people,
and the places where we were
taught at the end of 1987. The legacy of the scientific school
that I
became part of and of some of the people with whom I collaborated was
within me, however. It was a great privilege for me to live and
work
for dozens of years within that scientific and humanist community,
especially for sixteen years at PhIAN. It was in harmony with my
needs
and my nature. I would like briefly to pay tribute to that unique
scientific school and its guru, the great physicist Leonid Isaakovich
Mandelshtam, one of the most distinguished scientists of Russia.
Mandelshtam was born in Odessa in 1879; he
died in Moscow in 1944. His scientific works and lectures – Theory
of Oscillations, Basis of Quantum Mechanics, Selected Problems of
Optics, Basis of Relativity Theory
– are on my bookshelves. Next to them are a large photo of
Mandelshtam, the volume of memoirs dedicated to him on the centenary of
his birthday, and the collected papers of Nikolai Papalexi,
Mandelshtam's collaborator and closest friend of many dozens of
years.
The world scientific community lost a lot by the works of Mandelshtam
not being translated into English and other foreign languages –
especially his Theory of Oscillations, which fills up about
two volumes of his collected works. I wrote above about those
lectures.
Mandelshtam began his research at the
University of
Strasbourg (Germany) with the famous physicist Karl Ferdinand Brown,
who was the recipient of the 1909 Nobel Prize in physics together with
Guglielmo Marconi for developing wireless telegraphy. Mandelshtam
came
to Strasbourg in 1899 to continue his education when he was expelled
from the University of Novorossiysk because of his participation in
student disturbances.
Mandelshtam's collected works show that he was
equally familiar with all the branches of physics. For the reader
who
is a physicist or knows even a little about the history of physics, it
will be interesting to know the following. Mandelshtam discovered
theoretically, and with Papalexi confirmed experimentally, the inertia
of electrons in metals in 1912 – four years before the classical
experiments by Tolmen and Stewart in 1916! His wide-ranging ideas
famously brought him into conflict with leading experts in several
fields: arguing for the existence of radio side bands against Sir John
Ambrose Fleming; debating Lummer on the nature of the optical image;
and taking issue with winners of the Nobel Prize in physics, Lord
Rayleigh (John William Strutt) in 1908 and Max Planck in 1918, showing
that light will be scattered in a homogeneous medium because of the
inevitable density fluctuations in the medium. Although not a
mathematician by training, Mandelshtam found an error in the classical
mathematical theory of the physicist Arnold Sommerfeld on propagation
of radio waves along the surface of the earth. He showed very
clearly
in his lectures on quantum mechanics the faulty position Albert
Einstein took in his famous polemic with Niels Bohr about the basics of
quantum mechanics. Mandelshtam said, "Now the erroneous point of
A.
Einstein seems to be so trivial that it is even difficult to expound
that this initial point of view was Einstein's indeed." Niels
Bohr
published some papers about that dispute. But when Mandelshtam's
disciples asked him to publish his understanding of those discussions,
he said, "Einstein is so great that he himself understands the matter."
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