Russian science. Academician Morozov

2024 Author: Seth Attwood | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-12-16 15:55

Nikolai Aleksandrovich Morozov, working at the "junctions of sciences", using facts and methods of various fields of knowledge, became the founder of a systematic approach in science. He is rarely remembered, although the new Chronology of Fomenko and Nosovsky, for example, is based on the heritage of this particular scientist.

Honorary Academician N. A. Morozov is known as an original scientist who left a large number of works in the most diverse areas of natural and social sciences. N. A. Morozov performed works in various fields of astronomy, cosmogony, physics, chemistry, biology, mathematics, geophysics, meteorology, aeronautics, aviation, history, philosophy, political economy, linguistics. He wrote a number of well-known autobiographical, memoir, poetry and other literary works.

The personality of N. A. Morozov turned out to be focused on the highest intellect and the rebellious spirit of the Russian intelligentsia. Perhaps only V. I. Vernadsky can be placed next to him. Both of them personify a bygone era of scientists - encyclopedists. The style of his thinking is somewhat elusively reminiscent of the scientists of the medieval Renaissance. The "Silver Age", which is often written about, is characteristic not only of Russian poetry, art and culture. It can be traced in science as well. At the end of the 19th and the beginning of the 20th century, Russia experienced an upsurge. In everything that N. A. Morozov wrote and on what he pondered, thought, the steps of tomorrow were heard. According to his encyclopedic knowledge, enormous working capacity, productivity and creative potential, N. A. Morozov is an exceptional phenomenon.

Nikolai Alexandrovich Morozov was born in 1854. At that time, a torch and a candle also served as lighting in the village. He experienced the first steps in the development of technology, steam and electricity, and completed his life in the early period of the era of atomic energy, the possibility of which he foresaw earlier than most physicists and chemists.

Life in the midst of nature from childhood awakened in Nikolai Aleksandrovich a passionate interest in natural science. Having received his primary education at home, as was customary in noble families, as a fifteen-year-old boy, he entered the 2nd Moscow gymnasium. Nikolai Aleksandrovich unites around himself a group of young men who are striving for knowledge, like him, and organizes a circle called the Society of Natural Science Lovers, at weekly meetings of which scientific abstracts were heard. The members of the circle publish a handwritten journal under the editorship of Nikolai Alexandrovich.

Until 1874, N. A. Morozov leads a tense life full of scientific pursuits, deeply studying mathematics and a number of disciplines that were not included in the gymnasium's curriculum - astronomy, geology, botany and even anatomy. At the same time, he is interested in social issues, studies the history of revolutionary movements.

The difficult fate of N. A. Morozov was programmed from the first days of his life. The age-old drama of children born in an unequal marriage. In the case of N. A. Morozov, the noble blood of his father, who was related to Peter the Great, was diluted with the genes of his mother, who came from a serf family. History is replete with numerous examples when such children grew up to be extremely talented and intelligent people. This is one of the manifestations of the greatness of the nation. At the same time, such examples show their vulnerability in the face of popular philistine ideas. The position of the illegitimate child and related experiences made N. A. Morozov think about social injustice and material inequality in society.

In 1874 N. A. Morozov met some members of the revolutionary circle of "Tchaikovsky" (S. M. Kravchinsky and others). Their ideals and activities captivate Nikolai Alexandrovich so much that, despite disagreement with some of their views on the peasant issue, he, after being expelled from the gymnasium with a ban on entering any Russian educational institution, embarks on the path of revolutionary struggle.

N. A. Morozov leaves his family and "goes to the people", lives and works in the villages as an assistant to a blacksmith, a woodcutter, wanders, engaging in propaganda among the people, calling on them to fight for their liberation. But an ardent young man who longed for a feat for the sake of lofty ideals, "going to the people" and the subsequent activity in Moscow in workers' circles does not satisfy.

At the suggestion of his comrades, N. A. Morozov moved to Geneva, where he edited the "Rabotnik" magazine, which was illegally transported to Russia. At the same time, he continues to study natural science, sociology and history.

In the spring of 1875, when crossing the Russian border, he was arrested and sent to the Petersburg House of Preliminary Detention. While in prison, he stubbornly studies foreign languages, algebra, descriptive and analytical geometry, spherical trigonometry and other branches of mathematics.

After three years of imprisonment, in January 1878, N. A. Morozov was released and soon joined the new revolutionary organization "Land and Freedom". He becomes one of the editors of the journal "Land and Freedom" and the keeper of all illegal documents, money and print.

As a result of the internal struggle, "Land and Freedom" disintegrates into "Narodnaya Volya" and "Black Redistribution". N. A. Morozov became a member of the Executive Committee of the "Narodnaya Volya" party and in 1880 emigrated again to publish a magazine abroad called "Russian Social Revolutionary Library". At the same time he writes The History of the Russian Revolutionary Movement, studies at the University of Geneva, where he listens with particular interest to the lectures of famous natural scientists.

N. A. Morozov decides to attract Karl Marx to cooperation in the journal, for which he travels to London in December 1880, where he meets him and receives for translation into Russian the "Manifesto of the Communist Party" and a number of other works by K. Marx and F. Engels. According to the promise given to N. A. Morozov, K. Marx and F. Engels wrote a preface to the Russian translation of the Manifesto.

Returning from London to Geneva, Morozov receives a letter from Sophia Perovskaya and hastily sent to Russia to help his comrades in the struggle, but he was arrested at the border. After the murder of Alexander II, according to the "Process of 20 Narodnaya Volya", N. A. Morozov was sentenced to life imprisonment without the right to appeal the sentence.

In the Alekseevsky ravelin of the Peter and Paul Fortress, the strictest regime reigned. N. A. Morozov did not have the right to walk, did not receive books, from poor nutrition he developed scurvy and tuberculosis.

Exceptional will allowed N. A. Morozov to survive these difficult years and, retaining his fortitude, continue his scientific creative work. Two years later, the prisoners of the Alekseevsky ravelin were transferred to the Shlisselburg fortress, in which there was a particularly strict regime. Only after five years of N. A. Morozov's stay in the fortress, after a number of deaths among prisoners, the prison regime was somewhat weakened, and Morozov was able to read scientific literature and write his own works.

In the Shlisselburg convict prison, he wrote 26 volumes of various manuscripts, which he managed to save and take out when he was released from prison in 1905. In conclusion, N. A. Morozov studied French, English, German, Italian, Spanish, Latin, Greek, Hebrew, Old Slavic, Ukrainian and Polish languages.

There he also wrote his memoirs At the Beginning of Life, published in 1907. Subsequently, they composed the first part of his memoir "The Story of My Life".

In the fortress, he first began to read the "Journal of the Russian Physicochemical Society". Here he also wrote a theoretical essay "The structure of matter", which remained unpublished. Other works, in particular "Periodic systems of the structure of matter", were published only after leaving the fortress.

Studies carried out at the end of the 19th century by scientists from various countries have shown that both our planetary system and the most distant stellar nebulae are composed of the same elements that were found on Earth. The establishment of the unity of the chemical composition of world matter was of paramount scientific and philosophical importance.

In 1897, N. A. Morozov told his relatives from Shlisselburg: "Now I am writing a book about the structure of matter. I have already written almost fifteen hundred pages, and there are no more than five hundred left. Although this book is probably never destined to get into print, but Nevertheless, I have been working hard on it almost every day for the last three years and feel inexpressible pleasure whenever, after much thought, calculations, and sometimes sleepless nights, I manage to find order and correctness in such natural phenomena that until now seemed mysterious."

The inner world of the prisoner "with a dried-up body" turned out to be so rich, his self-control is so high that he not only did not die and did not go crazy in the terrible conditions of long solitary confinement in the "stone tomb" of the Alekseevsky Ravelin and the Shlisselburg fortress, but on the contrary, he filled his life by creativity. N. A. Morozov looked forward to every new day, since every new day allowed him to move forward in the development of scientific ideas. Many years later, Morozov will say that he was not in prison, but "in the Universe."

So, not far from St. Petersburg University, where DI Mendeleev was working at that time, there was a man in the Shlisselburg fortress who tirelessly thought about the essence of the periodic law, about the theory of the formation of chemical elements. Despite the absence of a systematic chemical education in a higher educational institution, despite the fact that N. A. Morozov did not go through the proper experimental school, thanks to his amazing talents, he mastered the heights of various chemical disciplines and two - three years after his release from the fortress he taught chemistry, wrote books on general physical, inorganic, organic and analytical chemistry. D. I. Mendeleev, with whom N. A. Morozov met shortly before his death, commended the work "Periodic systems of the structure of matter" defense of a thesis, academic degree of Doctor of Science.

N. A. Morozov was released as a result of the 1905 revolution. He devotes himself entirely to science, begins to prepare for publication his works written in prison. During the same period, he makes many lecture tours throughout Russia. With lectures, he visited 54 cities of the country - from St. Petersburg to Vladivostok. His public lectures on chemistry, aviation, and the history of religions were brilliant and drew huge audiences. All this frightened the authorities, and they often prohibited lectures.

The multifaceted scientist had another gift - poetry. He wrote stories, stories, poems. For the poetry collection "Star Songs" he was sentenced to one year in prison. In conclusion, he began to write his memoirs "The Story of My Life", characterized by a tense plot, beautiful language and apt images of his contemporaries. These memoirs were highly appreciated by Leo Tolstoy.

In 1907, at the invitation of P. F. Lesgaft, N. A. Morozov began to teach a course of general chemistry at the Higher Free School. A few years later, he was elected head of the Department of Astronomy at the Lesgaft Higher Courses.

In 1911, at the II Mendeleev Congress, N. A. Morozov made a report on the topic "The past and future of worlds from a modern geophysical point of view", where he expressed the bold idea that new stars arise as a result of the explosion of old stars, which occurs as a result of the decomposition of atoms of matter that have become radioactive. Now this, previously contested hypothesis, in a somewhat modified form, is shared by a wide circle of astronomers and physicists.

N. A. Morozov was interested in many branches of mathematics - from differential and integral calculus and algebra of complex numbers to vectors and projective geometry, as well as probability theory. His interest in these questions was closely related to the application of these mathematical disciplines to natural science. From 1908 to 1912 he published three large works in mathematics: "The beginnings of vectorial algebra in their genesis from pure mathematics", "Fundamentals of qualitative physical and mathematical analysis" and "Visual presentation of differential and integral calculus".

The most complete original and original ideas of N. A. Morozov in the field of astronomy are presented in his work "Universe". He considers in a new way questions about universal gravitation, about the origin and evolution of the solar system, about star clusters, about the structure of the Milky turbidity. N. A. Morozov worked a lot on questions of the theory of relativity. His remarkable ideas also include the hypothesis of the relationship and periodicity of astrophysical and astrochemical phenomena. For a long time he worked on the fundamental work "Theoretical Foundations of Geophysics and Meteorology", in which he showed that the influence of the Galaxy on the meteorological and geophysical processes of the Earth is natural and so great that without introducing it into calculations one cannot even dream of scientific weather prediction.

N. A. Morozov showed great interest in aviation and aeronautics. He became one of the pioneers of scientific aeronautics in Russia, received the title of pilot, was the chairman of the scientific flight commission, lectured at the aviation school, he himself flew the first balloons more than once, proposed a parachute system that automatically opens, as well as special suits for high-altitude flights (prototype modern clothing for pilots and astronauts).

During the First World War, in 1915, N. A. Morozov went to the front and here, at the forefront, as a delegate to the All-Russian Zemstvo Union, provides active assistance to the sick and wounded. He reflected his memories and thoughts about the war in the book "In the War", published in 1916.

After the October Revolution, N. A. Morozov transformed the Higher Courses of Lesgaft into the Natural Science Institute named after P. F. Lesgaft and became its elected director. At the same time, N. A. Morozov was in charge of the astronomical department of the institute and created an observatory in which he himself worked.

Since 1918, N. A. Morozov has been working with enthusiasm for many years on a large fundamental work "The History of Human Culture in Natural Science Illumination". Part of this great work in the form of seven volumes was published under the title "Christ" (edition 1924-1932). Three later volumes of the manuscript remained unpublished.

The title "Christ" proposed by the publishing house does not fully correspond to the content of this work. In the preface to the 7th volume, N. A. Morozov wrote: "The main task of this great work of mine was: to reconcile the historical sciences with natural science and to discover the general laws of the mental development of mankind." The version of the chronology of ancient history accepted today was created in the period of the XIV-XVI centuries and was finally completed, in basic outline, by the medieval historians-chronologists I. Skaliger (1540-1609) and D. Petavius (1583-1652). Morozov was the first to understand that both ancient and medieval events needed re-dating. Based on the analysis of a huge amount of factual material, having rechecked many historical documents using mathematical, linguistic and astronomical methods, N. A. Morozov put forward and partially substantiated the fundamental hypothesis that the Scaligerian chronology is artificially stretched, lengthened in comparison with reality. He pointed out ancient texts describing, probably, the same events, but later dated to different eras. Morozov pointed out that since the ancient texts were repeatedly rewritten and at the same time, as a rule, they were modified, they could deviate quite far from the original text. At that time, there was no such branch of science as mathematical linguistics. N. A. Morozov suggested establishing the authorship of texts and detecting plagiarism based on the statistical distribution of official words. In this respect, Morozov should be considered one of the forerunners of mathematical methods in linguistics.

When listing the works of N. A. Morozov, one cannot fail to mention his historical research on alchemy "In Search of the Philosopher's Stone". This book was received by readers with great interest, it is still one of the most fascinating works about the alchemical period in the development of chemistry. As you know, N. A. Morozov has always sought to study history from primary sources. Starting to write this book, he subjected to a critical analysis the historical manuscripts that covered the most important facts from the development of chemistry. This is how he assesses many historical documents that he had to use: "Everything that we know about the works of ancient authors is almost entirely taken by modern historians from collections of the 15th - 17th centuries, that is, from persons who lived a whole thousand years after the death of those quoted them from writers, from persons of the highest degree of gullibility, strewn their messages with incredible stories of all kinds of miracles. It is almost impossible to distinguish in them the truth from plausible fabrications and later additions. Due to this circumstance, all our primary sources for the ancient period of the pre-print era are real Augean stables, for the cleaning of which a new Hercules is needed. But even Hercules alone could not do anything here. A special international society for the development of the primary sources of ancient history is needed here."

However, the methodology of N. A. Morozov's study of the history of mankind, his historical concept, turned out to be so revolutionary that it was not recognized by the official historical science. The facts given by the scientist are considered to be largely misinterpreted by him. At present, research on the new chronology is continued not by historians, but by scientists of other fields of knowledge - mathematics, physics (in particular: M. M. Postnikov, A. T. Fomenko, G. V. Nosovsky, S. I. Valyansky, D. V. Kalyuzhny and others).

While still in prison, N. A. Morozov develops the idea of the complex structure of atoms and thereby substantiates the essence of the periodic law of chemical elements. He passionately defends the proposal on the possibility of the decomposition of the atom, which at that time seemed unconvincing to most physicists and chemists, since there has not yet been sufficient experimental evidence for this claim.

N. A. Morozov also expresses the idea that the main task of the chemistry of the future is the synthesis of elements.

Developing the idea of J. Dumas, N. A. Morozov proposed a periodic system of hydrocarbons - "carbohydrides", by analogy with the periodic table - "in increasing order of their share weight", and built tables reflecting the periodic dependence of a number of properties of aliphatic and cyclic radicals on the molecular weight.

N. A. Morozov suggested that chemically neutral elements should exist among atoms. A number of the atomic weights of elements of the zero and first groups calculated by N. A. Morozov coincided with the atomic weights of the corresponding isotopes determined many years later. A deep analysis of the properties of elements of the zero and eighth groups of Mendeleev's periodic system led N. A. Morozov to the idea of the need to combine them into one zero type, which was also justified by subsequent works. “Thus, - wrote the famous chemist Professor L. A. Chugaev, - N. A. Morozov could predict the existence of the zero group 10 years before it was actually discovered. Unfortunately, due to circumstances beyond his control, this prediction could not be published then and appeared in print much later."

It is striking and indisputable that more than 100 years ago N. A. Morozov boldly and confidently accepted the point of view of the complex structure of atoms, the transformability of elements, admitting the possibility of artificially obtaining radioactive elements, recognizing the extraordinary reserves of intra-atomic energy.

According to Academician IV Kurchatov, "modern physics has fully confirmed the assertion about the complex structure of atoms and the interconversion of all chemical elements, which was analyzed at one time by N. A. Morozov in the monograph" Periodic systems of the structure of matter ".

The research results of the last decades of the XX century mark the beginning of a true triumph of the ideas of V. I. Vernadsky, N. A. Morozov, K. E. Tsiolkovsky, A. L. Chizhevsky, which were not understood at the time.

N. A. Morozov from 1918 to the end of his life was the director of the Natural Science Institute named after P. F. Lesgaft, distinguished by the diversity of research in various fields of knowledge, as evidenced by the Proceedings of the Institute, published since 1919 under the editorship of N. A. Morozov. It was in this institute, on the initiative of the scientist, that the development of a number of problems related to space exploration began.

The principle of comprehensive research was embodied not only in the institute he headed, but also in the work of the scientific center, created in 1939 on his initiative in the village of Borok, Yaroslavl Region, where the Institute for Biology of Inland Waters and the Geophysical Observatory of the Russian Academy of Sciences now operate.

The Soviet government awarded Nikolai Aleksandrovich Morozov with two Orders of Lenin and the Order of the Red Banner of Labor. A museum was organized in the house where the honorary academician N. A. Morozov lived and worked. A village in the Leningrad region, not far from the Shlisselburg fortress, is named after him. Astronomers named a small asteroid planet after him. "Morozovia" entered all the star catalogs of the world. One of the craters of the far side of the Moon (5'N, 127'E) is also named after N. A. Morozov.

N. A. Morozov's constant striving to work at the "junctions of sciences", using facts and methods of various fields of knowledge, brings him close to the systematic scientific approach (which is now one of the leading methods in science) in the study of phenomena in their diverse and often unexpected connections uniting completely dissimilar, it would seem, phenomena and processes. The range of interests of the scientist extended from chemical elements to the essence of life; from the appearance of stars as a result of the explosion of cosmic bodies to the formation of clouds; from vector calculus to the theory of relativity; from the processes taking place in the center of the globe to aeronautics; from ancient and medieval history to the results of science at the beginning of the 20th century. N. A. Morozov believed that in the future all separate knowledge would be combined into one common natural science, merged into a mighty stream of united knowledge, and would become a common natural philosophy of the future.