Geochemistry and the Biosphere. Vladimir I. Vernadsky

      Vernadsky in his office, Moscow 1940

      He always tried to understand Newton’s abstract geometrical and mathematical space through real parts of physical space covered by natural bodies, including living organisms that not only “cover the space” but also form its characteristics in the space they cover. This is a way of understanding Vernadsky’s thoughts about the difference between the space of natural sciences and the space of philosophy and mathematics. A large section of his “Philosophical Thoughts of a Naturalist,” entitled “Time and Space in Living and Inert Matter,” is devoted to this problem.

      His ideas of the space of living organisms were drawn from L. Pasteur’s discovery of spatial difference and dissymmetry in organic molecules – which, as it turned out later, manifests itself also in macrophenomena, such as the direction of convolutions of spiral shells of mollusks, the spirality of some tree trunks and climbing plants, right- and left-handedness of man, different functions of the right and left hemispheres of the brain, and so forth.

      From separate empirical facts, Vernadsky draws the conclusion about a specific state of the real physical space of living organisms. He sees this specific state in the asymmetry of processes and structures on the territory occupied and controlled by organisms. Thus he posed the philosophical problem of the real characteristics of space (unlike the abstract space of geometry), separate parts of which are controlled by living organisms with their selective asymmetrical behavior, unlike the non-living nature around them in which symmetry dominates.

      Vernadsky’s treatment of the problem of the real meaning of time within biological systems is also complex. On the basis of the notion of the specific structure of physical space, part of which is at the disposal of every organism, it could be possible to think about some specific state of time within this unity of “space-time” or “biological time,” as Vernadsky called it. This is the so-called “proper time” of living organisms, which is related to their nature and to their own biological cycles, which are distinctly different in length. This time has nothing to do with the movement of celestial bodies or with the laws of the atomic nucleus decomposition on which the present-day definition of absolute time is based. This problem stated by Vernadsky has not been worked out either by natural science or by philosophy.

      Alexander Yanshin,

       Academician, Co-Founder,

       International V. I. Vernadsky Foundation,

       V. P. Emeritus of the Russian Academy of Sciences, Moscow

      Vernadsky at Borovoy 1942

      essays on geochemistry

      the history of geochemistry

1 geochemistry as a science of the twentieth century

      We are living at a turning point in a remarkable era of human history. Events of extreme importance and profundity are taking place in the realm of human thought. Our fundamental views of “the Universe,” “Nature,” or “the Whole,” so much spoken about in the eighteenth and the first half of the nineteenth century, are changing before our eyes with incredible speed. Not only theories and scientific hypotheses, those ephemeral products of intellect, but also new exact empirical facts and generalizations of exclusive value make us rebuild and reconstruct the picture of nature that has remained untouched and almost unchanged by many generations of scientists and thinkers.

      The new worldview, in fact the profound renewal of the centuries-old ideas about our surroundings and ourselves, captures us more and more every day. It inevitably penetrates into the domains of separate sciences, into the field of scientific work. These new views concern not only the inert matter that surrounds us, but they also embrace the phenomena of life; they change our notions in the fields of knowledge that we consider the closest to us and the most important. We can say that never in the history of human thought, have the idea and feeling of the whole, and of the causal interrelation of all observed phenomena, possessed such depth, sharpness and clarity as they have reached now in the twentieth century.

      The study of the change that has taken place in these ideas and notions makes us think that we are still very far from the ultimate result, and that we have hardly begun to realize the route that the new scientific work has taken. This must be taken into account while evaluating the new concepts of atoms and chemical elements that penetrate our present-day science. They are taking shape in the unsteady, changing, and almost unfamiliar picture of the cosmos. Atoms and elements – the old intuitions of ancient thought – are constantly changing their image and taking new forms in these new and contradictory circumstances.

      Each chemical element, we think, corresponds to a certain atom or atoms that are distinctly different in composition from other atoms corresponding to other chemical elements. The atom of the science of the twentieth century is not the atom of the ancient thinkers of Hellas and India, and neither is it the atom seen by the Moslem mystics of the Middle Ages and by the scientists of the last four centuries of our civilization. It is quite a new idea – a new notion. And although the historical roots of our present-day thoughts can be traced back to the atoms and elements of ancient science and philosophy, the changes undergone by them are so great that there is nothing left from the old concepts except the names.

      Everything has changed crucially. Maybe it would have been more correct to give a new name to the “atom” of the twentieth century, because it could be done without doing any harm to the historical truth. Our atom does not in the least resemble the matter it forms. The laws of its existence are not similar to the laws of the matter formed by it. In matter, in its physical and chemical characteristics, we observe only general statistical manifestations of large conglomerates of atoms. These show, in a vague and complicated form, only an insignificant part of the characteristics of the atoms themselves, and of their inner structure.

      A deep gap separates the scientific model of our surroundings and ourselves – according to the manifestations conditioned by our senses (the macroscopic view of the cosmos) – from the scientifically constructed cosmos where the atom reigns (the microscopic view of the cosmos). The principal physical notions, as well as the method of scientific thinking, suffer a crucial change in these manifestations. As soon as we make scientific advances into the world of the atom, our concept of physical causality sharply changes and deepens, while the century-old ideas about it are destroyed. [In addition to the micro and macro concepts of matter] a third aspect of the cosmos is taking shape at present thanks to the success of astronomical observation and research of the twentieth century: the world of space-time scientifically embraced by large numbers, that – like the atom world – cannot be measured by our senses.

      These three concepts about the world, about the reality covered by science, are not coordinated. Everything is in a state of creative motion, both scientifically and philosophically. The atom and its corresponding chemical element are present in all three forms of the worldview. It seems very probable that with attempts at further generalization, great significance will be gained through the trend of scientific synthesis that was put forward in the middle of the eighteenth century by the great Serbo-Croatian thinker, Ruggiero Boscovich (1711–1787), and that is drawing more and more attention at present.

      An atom is not a formless and structureless “center of forces,” but a regular conglomerate that according to Boscovich is comprised of matter and universe.¹ The history of this trend of thought, which seems to outline and anticipate the way of future scientific thought, has not yet been written. Another great natural scientist, Boscovich’s contemporary, James Hutton (1726–1797), approached the same world view independently and laid the foundations for contemporary geology.

      An integrated scientific worldview does not yet exist, but the countless new facts unveiling the structure of nature in all its aspects make our thought go deeper and deeper into the realm of atoms, and still further, to the