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VLADIMIR VERNADSKY

Vladimir Vernadsky
Vladimir Vernadsky

Vladimir Ivanovich Vernadsky (Володимир Іванович Вернадський/Владимир Иванович Вернадский) (March 12, 1863 [O.S. February 28] - January 6, 1945) was a Russian-Ukrainian mineralogist and geochemist whose ideas of noosphere were an important contribution to the Russian cosmism. He was a founding father of several new disciplines, including geochemistry, biogeochemistry, and radiogeology.

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[edit] Biography

Vernadsky graduated from St Petersburg University in 1885. As the last mineralogist had died in 1887 in Russia, and Dokuchaev, a soil scientist, and A.P. Pavlov, a geologist, had been teaching mineralogy for a while, Vernadsky chose to enter on the ground floor in Minerology. He wrote to his wife Natasha Vernadsky on 20 June 1888 from Switzland, where he was on a trip with Zeitel:

...to collect facts for their own sake, as many now gather facts, without a program, without a question to answer or a purpose is not interesting. However, there is a task which someday those chemical reactions which took place at various points on earth; these reactions take place according to laws which are known to us, but which, we are allowed to think, are closely tied to general changes which the earth has undergorne by the earth with the general laws of celestial mechanics. I believe there is hidden here still more to discover when one considers the complexity of chemical elements and the regularity of their occurrence in groups...

Actually, Vernadsky had a pretty rough time at his first postgraduate career. While trying to find a topic for his doctorate, he first went to Naples to study with the crystallographer Scacchi, who was senile at that time. The senility of Scacchi lead Vernadsky to go to Germany to study under Paul Groth. There, Vernadsky learned how to use the modern equipment of Grote who had developed a machine to study the optical, thermal, elastic, magnetic and electrical properties of crystals, as well as using the physics lab of Prof. Zonke, who was also working on crystallisation. After three weeks there, Groth gave Vernadsky a small project with a partner Mutman (who Vernadsky wrote was lazy) to determine the optic qualities of a complex compound.

He first popularized the concept of the noosphere and deepened the idea of the biosphere to the meaning largely recognized by today's scientific community. The word biosphere was invented by Austrian geologist Eduard Suess, whom Vernadsky had met in 1911. Vernadsky is considered one of the precursors of ecology.

In Vernadsky's theory of how the Earth develops, the noosphere is the third stage in a succession of phases of development of the earth, after the geosphere (inanimate matter) and the biosphere (biological life). Just as the emergence of life fundamentally transformed the geosphere, the emergence of human cognition fundamentally transformed the biosphere. In this theory, the principles of both life and cognition are the essential features of the earth's evolution, and must have been implicit in the earth all along. This is in contrast to Darwin's theory of natural selection, which looks at each individual species, rather than at its relationship to a subsuming principle.

Vernadsky was the founder and the first president of the Ukrainian Academy of Sciences in Kiev, Ukraine (1918) and worked closely with the Tavrida University in Crimea. During the Russian Civil War, he hosted the gatherings of the young intellectuals who later founded the emigre Eurasianist movement [1]. One of the main avenues in both Moscow and Tavrida National University, Crimea are named after him.

In the late 1930s and early 1940s, Vernadsky played an early advisory role in the Soviet atomic bomb project, as one of the most forceful voices arguing for the exploitation of atomic energy, the surveying of Soviet uranium sources, and having nuclear fission research conducted at his Radium Institute. He died, however, before a full project was pursued.

Vernadsky's son George Vernadsky (1887-1973) emigrated to the United States where he published numerous books on medieval Russian history as well as medieval Ukrainian history and modern Russian history.

[edit] Works (selected)

  • Geochemistry, published in Russian 1924
  • The Biosphere, first published in Russian in 1926. English translations:
  • Essays on Geochemistry & the Biosphere, tr. Olga Barash, Santa Fe, NM, Synergetic Press, ISBN 0-907791-36-0, 2006

[edit] Diaries

  • Dnevniki 1917-1921: oktyabr 1917-yanvar 1920 (Diaries 1917-1921), Kiev, Naukova dumka, 1994, ISBN 5-12-004641-X, 269pp.
  • Dnevniki. Mart 1921-avgust 1925 (Diaries 1921-1925), Moscow, Nauka, 1998, ISBN 5-02-004422-9, 213pp.
  • Dnevniki 1926-1934 (Diaries 1926-1934), Moscow, Nauka, 2001, ISBN 5-02-004409-1, 455pp.
  • Dnevniki 1935-1941 v dvukh knigakh. Kniga 1, 1935-1938 (Diaries 1935-1941 in two volumes. Volume 1, 1935-1938), Moscow, Nauka, 2006,ISBN 5-02-033831-1,444pp.
  • Dnevniki 1935-1941 v dvukh knigakh. Kniga 2, 1939-1941 (Diaries 1935-1941. Volume 2, 1939-1941), Moscow, Nauka, 2006, ISBN 5-02-033832-X, 295pp.

[edit] Notes

  1. ^ See Vernadsky's diaries in the "Works" section, summarized in Sergei Glebov. "Russian and East European Books and Manuscripts in the United States" in Russian and East European Books and Manuscripts in the United States: Proceedings of a Conference in Honor of the Fiftieth Anniversary of the Bakhmeteff Archive of Russian and East European History and Culture (Slavic and East European Information Resources, Volume 4, Number 4 2003), eds. Jared S. Ingersoll and Tanya Chebotarev, The Haworth Press, 2003, ISBN 0-7890-2405-5 p.29

[edit] See also

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