Boris Hessen

Boris Mikhailovich Hessen (Russian Борис Михайлович Гессен ), also Gessen (born 16 Augustjul / August 28 1893greg in Jelisawetgrad, .. † December 20, 1936 in Moscow) was a Russian physicist, philosopher and historian of science. He was known for his lecture on Newton's Principia (London 1931), who was influential in the science of history.

Biography

Boris Hessen was born into a Jewish family. His father was a bank clerk (later nationalized Hesse personally in the Revolution his father's bank ). He went to high school in Jelisawetgrad. Together with his school friend Igor Tamm, he studied physics and natural sciences at the University of Edinburgh ( 1913-1914 ). He then studied physics at the State University of Saint Petersburg (1914-1917) and economics at the Polytechnic.

In the Russian Civil War he joined the Red Army and became a communist and member of the Revolutionary Military Council ( 1919-1921 ). 1921 to 1924 he was at the Sverdlovsk Communist University. He also continued his physics studies and eventually graduated in 1928 in Moscow at the " Institute of Red Professors " his studies. After two years working at this institute, he became in 1931 Professor and Head of the Department of Physics at the Lomonosov University in Moscow. In 1933 he was elected to the Russian Academy of Sciences. Under his leadership, the physics experienced at the Lomonosov a blossom with the school of Leonid Mandelstam, who was also Tamm, and the Hessians shielded against attacks from party - physicists. However, he expressed himself in his Soviet Encyclopedia article on the airwaves so unhappy that he became the object of ridicule of the Leningrad theoretical physicists George Gamow, Lev Landau, Dmitri Ivanenko ( they sent him a satirical picture Telegram ), which temporarily for this had vocational disadvantages.

1931 Hessen held at the Second International Congress of History of Science in London his famous lecture The Socio-Economic Roots of Newton 's Principia. He led a decades- long debate about a more externalist or internalist historiography of science. Robert K. Merton tried in "Science, Technology and Society in Seventeenth Century England " (1938 ), an alternative non-Marxist interpretation of the scientific revolution to offer.

In the UK, came the contributions of Hesse and other Soviet scientists at the Congress on an enthusiastic response among socialist scholars.

From 1934 to 1936 Hesse was deputy director of the Lebedev Institute in Moscow, which was led by Sergei Ivanovich Vavilov. On August 21, 1936 Hessen was arrested by the NKVD. In a secret trial before a military court, he was charged along with his teacher at the Gymnasium Arkadi Ossipowitsch Apirin for Trotskyism. They were found guilty on December 20, 1936 and executed by firing squad on the same day. In the investigation files of the case Hesse found as proof of the allegations only the testimony of Nikolai Afanasievich Karjew, which is also 1936 executed Deputy Chairman of the Planning Commission of the Academy of Sciences, who described him as a key member of the " Trotskyist " organization of Grigory Zinoviev.

On April 21, 1956 both of which were posthumously rehabilitated.

Publications

• Boris Hessen, The Social and Economic Roots of Newton 's Principia in: Nicolai I. Bukharin, Science at the Crossroads, London 1931 ( reprint New York 1971), pp. 151-212. New translation: Gideon Freudenthal, Peter McLaughlin (see below ), pp. 41-101.
• Boris Hessen: Les racines sociales et économiques of the " Principia " de Newton: une rencontre entre Newton et à Londres en Marx 1931 /. Trad. et commentaires de Serge Guérout; postface de Christopher Chilvers - Paris:. Vuibert, 2006
• Gideon Freudenthal, Peter McLaughlin: The Social and Economic Roots of the Scientific Revolution, texts by Boris Hessen and Henryk Grossmann. . Springer, Heidelberg, New York, 2009 (Boston Studies in the Philosophy of Science, Vol 278), ISBN 978-1-4020-9603-7
• Pablo Huerga Melcón, La ciencia en la Encrucijada. Crítico Análisis de la celebre ponencia de Boris Mihailovich Hesse, " Las de la raíces socioeconómicas mecánica de Newton", desde las coordenadas del materialismo Filosofico " Biblioteca Filosofía en español, Fundación Gustavo Bueno, Pentalfa ediciones, Oviedo 1999. (Con Prólogo de Serguei Kara- Murza )