Biophysicist Alexander Leonidovich Chizhevsky: biography, achievements, discoveries and awards

2024 Author: Henry Conors | [email protected]. Last modified: 2024-02-12 02:47

In 1930, the First International Congress on Biophysics and Biocosmology opened in New York. Alexander Leonidovich Chizhevsky was elected its honorary president. In the adopted Memorandum, he was called the founder of new branches of knowledge about man for the breadth of scientific interests that stretched from the depths of a living cell to the Sun. He was called the Russian Leonardo da Vinci of his century. And he was then only 42 years old, and he was entering the time of his creative flowering…

Childhood

The future scientist was born at the beginning of 1897 in the small settlement of Tsekhanovets near Grodno, where the military unit was located, to which his father, artillery officer Leonid Vasilyevich Chizhevsky, was assigned. Mother - Nadezhda Aleksandrovna Neviandt - after the birth of her son, she did not live long and died of tuberculosis a year later. The boy's own aunt, Olga Vasilievna Leslie (Chizhevskaya), took care of the boy.

The father did not remarry and paid much attention to the upbringing and education of his son. Noticing his penchant for science, heequipped a real laboratory at home, which Alexander Leonidovich Chizhevsky always considered the source of his scientific activity. From the aunt who replaced him, he absorbed interest in the humanities, and classes in poetry and painting, which began in these early years, would accompany Chizhevsky all his life.

Following the head of the family, who by the end of his life became an artillery general who was assigned to various military units, they lived for several months in various cities of Russia and abroad, including Paris.

Kaluga

In 1913, the Chizhevskys got the opportunity to settle in Kaluga for a long time. This city played a decisive role in the fate of the future scientist - his real scientific biography began here. Alexander Chizhevsky wrote later that the acquaintance and close friendship with Konstantin Eduardovich Tsiolkovsky was of crucial importance for the formation of his scientific interests.

The view of this unique thinker was directed to the depths of space and, perhaps, under his influence already in 1914 Chizhevsky began to study the influence of the activity of the Sun on the biological and social sphere of our planet. Another topic of his research is the effect of artificially ionized air on living organisms.

After graduating from the senior classes of a real school in Kaluga, in 1915 Alexander Leonidovich Chizhevsky entered two higher educational institutions at once - he was officially enrolled in the Moscow Commercial Institute and received the right to take a course at the Moscow Archaeological Institute. So his interest in various aspects of life was embodied.of a person: in one course he studies the exact sciences - physics and mathematics, in the other - the humanities.

The periodicity of the world-historical process

In 1917, two works for the initial scientific title were published in Moscow: "Russian lyrics of the 17th century" and "The evolution of physical and mathematical sciences in the ancient world." Candidate's degree candidate - Chizhevsky Alexander Leonidovich. His biography as a young scientist was interrupted by participation in the First World War. In 1916, he fought as a volunteer on the Galician front, served as a reconnaissance mortar unit, was awarded the St. George Cross and was wounded.

Even at the beginning of the war, Alexander Leonidovich Chizhevsky established the relationship between changes in solar activity and events on Earth. The severity of the military conflict in Europe, as he found out, increased during periods of passage through the central meridian of the main star of our system of the maximum number of sunspots. Then he carefully studied the ancient chronicles of different peoples in search of confirmation of this pattern in history. The result was his successful defense of his doctoral dissertation on the subject in 1918.

The main conclusion of the young scientist was almost shocking: the cyclicity of solar activity exactly corresponds to the periods of global changes in the Earth's biosphere and in the course of life and socio-political processes. Many aspects of the existence of human civilization were subject to the influence of space: the frequency of mental illness and massepidemics, crop yields and economic crises, the emergence of new scientific theories and the emergence of wars and revolutions.

Science and poetry

In subsequent years, the researcher continues his education, studying simultaneously at two faculties of Moscow State University: medical and physics and mathematics. He develops the theory of electrical exchange in living organisms, conducting experiments in his home laboratory in Kaluga, having made a discovery about the effect of light negatively charged air ions on the human and animal body, working on an installation for the production of these particles, later called the Chizhevsky chandelier.

At the same time, he does not leave active studies in poetry. The chairman of the branch of the All-Russian Poetic Union is also Chizhevsky Alexander Leonidovich. His books, published in those years, are both The Physical Factors of the Historical Process (1924) and The Notebook of Poems (1919). Maximilian Voloshin and Pavel Florensky, Mayakovsky and Valery Bryusov, Alexei Tolstoy and Vyacheslav Ivanov spoke positively about his literary experiments. Professional artists noted the originality of his watercolor landscapes, which were painted in moments of rare rest.

The unity of scientific views and creative understanding of the commonality of man and the cosmos - this is what distinguished the scientist and poet Chizhevsky Alexander Leonidovich. The philosophy of his attitude to life is clearly expressed in these lines:

We are children of the Cosmos. And our Dear Home

So soldered by the Commonality and inextricably strong, What do we feel merged into one, That at every point The world - the whole world is concentrated…

There is no prophet in his own country…

The breadth of Alexander Chizhevsky's scientific interests can only be expressed in the list of scientific and practical fields where his work is highly appreciated by colleagues: zoopsychology, heliobiology, aeroionization, ionification, biophysics, space biology, hematology, structural analysis of blood, electrostaining technology and much more. But most of them were foreign scientists. Chizhevsky received a worthy assessment of his scientific work in his homeland only posthumously. And he was denied travel at the invitation of numerous foreign scientific organizations.

And many scientific studies were carried out by scientists already in camps and "sharashkas". The sharp discrepancy between his ideas and official scientific views was striking even to the most ignorant fighters for the triumph of communist ideology. It is not surprising that Alexander Leonidovich Chizhevsky was among those repressed in Stalin's times. A brief biography of him as a convict under the notorious Article 58 of the Criminal Code began in 1942. After that, for 8 years he moved to different points of the huge Gulag - Ivdellag in the Northern Urals, Kuchino in the Moscow region, Karlag in Kazakhstan.

This was preceded by many years of persecution, labeling obscurantist and sun worshiper, when Chizhevsky's ideas about the influence of cosmic energy onbiosphere of the Earth, persecuted the supporters of this theory and withdrew the author's books from the press. Chizhevsky Alexander Leonidovich was released in 1950. He voluntarily stayed in the camp to complete the necessary experiments on the study of blood cells. Subsequently, he was rehabilitated, but completely - only posthumously.

Legacy

Who is he - Chizhevsky Alexander Leonidovich? A biophysicist who proved a clear relationship between the energy of the cosmos and human life? A philosopher who proclaimed the harmony and inevitability of such a relationship? A subtle and extraordinary poet and painter, whose works are full of this universal energy?

A positive answer to any of these questions makes his life truly outstanding.