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introduction

The purpose of this introduction is to familiarize the reader with the powerful historic figure of Vladimir Ivanovich Vernadsky (1863–1945) as a great scientist and thinker of the twentieth century. The scope of his genius can be fully comprehended only through acquaintance with all his creative work in the fields of natural science, biology, and philosophy, which by far exceeds the common idea of Vernadsky as a geochemist, mineralogist, and geologist.

Vernadsky’s teachings on the biosphere and noösphere belong to science, just as Darwin’s theory of the evolution of species, Bohr’s fundamentals of quantum physics, and Einstein’s relativity theory. That is why this edition is a homage to the history of fundamental scientific ideas to which the teaching of the biosphere clearly belongs. Vernadsky was the founder of genetic mineralogy, geochemistry, biogeochemistry (the concept of “living matter” as a geological force), the theory of the biosphere, radiogeology, and hydrogeology. His ideas gave birth to many scientific disciplines. By force of logic and generalization he anticipated the ideas of unity of time and space, of the physical vacuum and of the asymmetry of space. His ideas of the “local” features of sections of the world’s ocean, occupied by living organisms or growing crystals, have not yet been fully understood and developed in terms of present-day physics. Long before World War II, Vernadsky had written about the potential use of atomic energy for military purposes and, in this connection, about the great responsibility of scientists, though physicists had not even thought about creating an atom bomb. Such was the scope of his thought and vision.

Vernadsky’s teachings not only prepare the ground for planetary thinking, but also exemplify a full-scale understanding of the unity of the planet’s living and non-living nature and the unity of the planet with its cosmic environment. This unity is the gist of Vernadsky’s teachings.

V. I. Vernadsky is undoubtedly a great and rare phenomenon in the history of natural science. Such powerful figures do not emerge every century. This is the way I see him, and this is the way I would like to introduce him to the English-speaking reader.

vernadsky’s life

Vernadsky, St. Petersburg, 1875

The future scientist and Academician Vladimir Ivanovich Vernadsky was born in St. Petersburg into a nobleman family with ancient historic roots in the Ukraine. In his early years, he was an ordinary boy, a bit phlegmatic and shy, and manifested no signs of genius. From early childhood, he was keen on reading. No one in the family controlled his reading, and he used his father’s large library to his heart’s content. At age twenty-three, he recollected in one of his letters:

I threw myself at books early and read voraciously everything I came across, constantly digging in my father’s library…. From these early years, I especially remember various books on geography, not only about travels but also rather dry books that seemed difficult for my age, for instance, The Earth by E. Reclus…. At the same time, I was fond of books on history, especially Greek.

And then, speaking about his High School years:

I was deeply interested in the history of the Church…. My home life gave me the main thing: dozens of journals, Russian and foreign, that my father subscribed to.

Vernadsky’s father was a professor of political economy, which seems very far from geological sciences. But political economy compares human needs with natural conditions; from here, it is not far to Vernadsky’s subsequent understanding of nature and man’s place in it. As a young man, Vernadsky wanted to take up history but decided first to get an education in natural science. In 1885, Vladimir Ivanovich graduated from the natural science department of the faculty of Mathematics and Physics of St. Petersburg University, and continued at the faculty to prepare for a professor’s degree.

Vernadsky studied at St. Petersburg University when it was in its heyday: a brilliant constellation of scientists gathered there; they created an era not only in Russian but also in world science. His teachers were the chemists Mendeleyev, Butlerov, and Menshutkin, the soil scientists Dokuchaev and Kostychev, the geologist Inostrantsev, the geographer and meteorologist Voyeikov, and other famous scientists of that time. Each of them made a great contribution to twentieth-century science. The first among them was D. I. Mendeleyev. I do not need to introduce the creator of the Periodic Law and the Periodic Table of the Elements, which are studied in every school. The ideas of Mendeleyev, and especially those of the soil scientist Dokuchaev, greatly influenced Vernadsky’s later scientific work.

Having received a geological education, Vernadsky first took up crystallography and mineralogy at St. Petersburg University. After moving to Moscow, he delivered lectures in mineralogy at Moscow University, at the chair of a famous geologist and subsequent Academician of his time, A. P. Pavlov, who was one of Vernadsky’s teachers whose name we shall come across below.

During his student years and his work at Moscow University, Vernadsky took part in Dokuchaev’s expeditions, studying soil chemistry in different regions of Russia. It is easy to understand that the science created by Vernadsky – geochemistry – turned out as “genetic” as Dokuchaev’s soil science. It embraced not only the distribution and content of chemical elements in the Earth’s crust, the atmosphere, and the natural waters, but also their origin under different conditions and the places of their existence, their migration in the course of geological processes, and especially their biogenic migration as the result of the activity of living matter in the biosphere. That is why the titles of separate sections of Essays on Geochemistry contain the word history: history of carbon, of oxygen, and so on.

Vernadsky and other students at St. Petersburg University 1884

Although the scope of his scientific work was tremendous, Vernadsky never limited himself to it. Like many representatives of the Russian intelligentsia of his time, he was deeply concerned with social and political problems. He plunged into social activities early, in his student years. He was one of the founders of the first political party in Tsarist Russia – the Constitutional Democrats – and a member of its leading central committee. Twice he was elected a member of the State Council, the supreme elected body of Russia, where he expressed his emphatically democratic political views. In 1911, he resigned from Moscow University, along with twenty-one leading professors, in a collective protest against the Education Minister’s arbitrary rule. He then decided to give up teaching and to devote himself entirely to scientific work. After 1917, he gave up political and social activities as well.

All of Vernadsky’s scientific work was accompanied by extensive organizational activities: He attracted the interest of the Academy of Sciences, with its potential for scientific investigation, to the circle of scientific problems he was anticipating, or he created new branches in the Academy. In 1912, he founded the first radiochemical laboratory in Russia. In 1915, on his initiative, a committee of the Academy of Sciences was created to “study the natural productive forces of the country.” At first, it was meant to discover new sources of strategic ores, because Russia was taking part in World War I. He also included the study of uranium ore deposits as a task of the committee. He was chairman of this committee for fifteen years, until it became the State Geology Committee.

Vernadsky and other professors of Moscow University who resigned in 1911 in support of students’ protest against the Education Ministry

In 1926, at Vernadsky’s suggestion, the “Committee on the History of Science” was founded at the Academy of Sciences; Vernadsky remained its head until 1930. It later became the Institute of History of Natural Science and Technology which continues to carry out successful work together with a similar branch of the Smithsonian Institution in the United States.

During the Russian Civil War 1918–1921, he actively participated in the creation of the Ukrainian Academy of Sciences and became its first president. No matter where he lived during the most difficult years, he created new branches of scientific research, groups of scientists, and laboratories that proved long-lived because he founded them on new, fundamental scientific concepts and perspectives.

vernadsky’s teachings

Vernadsky’s idea that living beings possess a great geological significance in changing the Earth’s face gave birth to a new science – biogeochemistry. This concept increasingly interested Vernadsky and eventually became the main content of his creative work. Near the end of his life in 1944, he wrote as if summing up:

I spent the years of World War I in constant research and creative work, and I have been going on in the same direction up till now…. All these years, no matter where I was, I was captured by the thought of geochemical and biogeochemical manifestations in the surrounding nature (the biosphere).

These new geochemical and biogeochemical ideas did not enter the scientific mind of that time. Old notions reigned supreme in geology many years after Vernadsky’s works had been published. His thought was far ahead of his time, and he was not understood by many of his contemporaries. That is why the creation of biogeochemistry and the concepts of the biosphere not only manifests his scientific genius, but is also a striking example of the anticipatory power of this scientist, of his persistence in reaching the goal, of faith in his ideas, and of being able to work in most unfavorable conditions. We should remember that his most significant scientific achievements were made during the years of civil war and economic breakdown in Russia.

The central concept of Vernadsky’s teaching is that of the biosphere, but its definition in literature has been vague until now. Many people define it in an easy way as “the realm of life,” the territory of the planet inhabited by living organisms at any given time. But it is not quite like that. In Vernadsky’s understanding, the biosphere is a historic concept. It dates back to the very first manifestations of life on Earth – manifestations that created the oxygenated atmosphere and changed the planet’s surface in the course of life’s evolution, which is still ongoing. By “the biosphere,” Vernadsky meant all the layers of the planet, and first of all the layers of the Earth’s crust, that had undergone the influence of biogeochemical activity throughout its entire geological history. This idea of the historic character of the biosphere was shown rather recently in a large geological, geochemical, and paleontological work, a book by the Leningrad geologist Andrey Lapo that was translated into English as Traces of Bygone Biospheres (Synergetic Press, 1987).

Vernadsky in suburbs of Prague (circa 1928)

Vernadsky’s concept of the biosphere is as diverse and hierarchical as the structure of the actual biosphere. This concept integrates the data of all sciences that relate to the Earth, all biology, chemistry, and biochemistry. The growing specialization of the sciences has provided great progress in the knowledge of profound details and intimate mechanisms of life, without getting closer to understanding its essence. This widely acknowledged drawback of contemporary science consists in its failure to embrace Earth’s nature in all its scope and profundity, on a planetary and cosmic scale. Given this background, the concept of the biosphere, in its unprecedented scope and depth, is an excellent example of the integration of the sciences and a great event in the science of the twentieth century.

All this became possible due to the long-term and conscious approach to the integral study of any phenomenon in connection with other phenomena. Vernadsky wrote about the necessity of such an approach as long ago as the end of the nineteenth century, in his student diary; at that time the process of the specialization of science and its division into a number of specific disciplines and trends was only beginning. Later, in 1920, he privately recollected:

I have long been surprised at the lack of desire to embrace Nature as a whole in the field of empirical knowledge, whereas it is within our grasp to do so. Often we as scientists give only a mere collection of facts and observations where actually we could present the whole … It looks like some mental laziness. We feel that if we make an effort, we can rise to embracing the phenomenon as a whole, but this effort is not made, and judging by the literature nobody makes it.

Only much later, in the second half of the twentieth century, was this approach in science widely realized, acknowledged, defined and called integrative, systematic, global, etc. An example is provided by one of the fundamental principles of biology; namely, the unity of the organism and its environment. The briefest definition of this principle was probably given by the Russian physiologist I. M. Sechenov, who believed in the late nineteenth century that the description of an organism would not be complete without the description of its environment. Vernadsky came to affirm this principle on a different scale, independently and in his own way as a geologist and a biochemist, through ideas about the matter-energy connections of organisms and their environment in the biosphere. But he did not restrict the concept to an individual; he thought on the geological scale of the living matter of humankind as a whole. He wrote:

Humankind, as living matter, is constantly connected with the matter-energy processes of the defined geological envelope of the Earth – its biosphere. Not for a single moment can humankind be physically independent of its environment.

Vernadsky in his St. Petersburg office 1921

In the course of the development of Vernadsky’s notions of the biosphere as the most active part of the planet’s matter and its connection with cosmic factors, he was getting a more extensive idea about its limits – the boundaries of the integral approach within which the biosphere processes were to be studied in order to get as close as possible to an exhaustive understanding of the subject. Reading his Essays on Geochemistry and The Biosphere, it is easy to see that the author, while projecting the phenomena he considers on the whole biosphere, is constantly reminding us that the planet itself also has its external connections, its “habitat” in the cosmos. The dependence of the biosphere upon the luminous radiation of the Sun is obvious to us all, but Vernadsky had left the problem of the Earth’s cosmic connections open for further discoveries in this field, since he understood their scientific inevitability. We now know more about these connections than in Vernadsky’s time. It is enough to remember the galactic and extra-galactic cosmic radiation, the role of the magnetosphere of the Earth in preventing the destructive effects of cosmic radiation upon terrestrial life, the loss of terrestrial oxygen in the upper layers of the atmosphere, the role of the ozone screen of the Earth, and the connection of biological processes with solar activity. But all this is included in the realm embraced by Vernadsky’s scientific mind, which actually had no boundaries.

Reflecting on the structure or the macrostructure of the visible cosmos as an object of scientific study, Vernadsky clearly distinguished “three separate layers of reality,” within which the scientifically stated facts are situated. These three layers of reality, in all probability, differ distinctly from each other in properties of space and time. They penetrate into one another, but they are definitely realms unto themselves, distinctly delimited from one another both in their content and in the methods of studying their manifestations. These layers are the following: the phenomena of cosmic spaces, the planetary phenomena of our visible “nature,” so close to us, and the microscopic realm in which gravity is of secondary importance. The phenomena of life are observed only in the two latter layers of world reality.

Vernadsky embraced with his mind’s view all these layers of the world’s reality. Such scope of thinking is unprecedented in the last centuries of exact (not speculative) sciences. At the same time, one cannot but think that the scope of his ideas is directly related to philosophical and religious systems of the ancient East, India, and Tibet, although Vernadsky based his ideas strictly on empirical data from which he never digressed. In the literature “the phenomenon of Vernadsky” is often spoken of in connection with the power of his scientific thinking. Of course, there were many factors that contributed to his development as a scientist, such as his education and upbringing, his will, his character, his persistence (as noted, he read in fifteen languages), his analytical and critical mind, etc. But many other scientists possessed all these to a certain extent. What, then, is the “phenomenon of Vernadsky?”

The main features of his thinking are probably his wide range of thought and his extraordinary breadth of scientific generalization, not in some definite field but in everything with which he dealt. The scope of his scientific generalization is enormous. In order to embrace with his mind the specific role of living organisms in changing the Earth’s crust, which he had already comprehended in general, he had to abstract himself from the specific functions of millions of animal species, and see only the one common function involved in changing the surrounding non-living nature – a function that could not be seen by botanists, zoologists, nor microbiologists. He saw this in the geologically generalized property of all living organisms – in their capacity to transform the energy and matter of the upper envelopes of the planet. It was then that the new, large-scale notion of “living matter” appeared to denote this generalized bearer of the generalized function of living organisms.

Being a geologist, Vernadsky could not do without this notion of his newly realized geological power of living organisms, comparing it with the classical tectonic processes: volcanism, water and wind erosion, and other traditionally known geological causes of change of the planet’s face in its geological history. This newly discovered geological force has turned out to be much more powerful than the natural elemental forces, and it is of cosmic essence, since it is brought into action by the energy of cosmic and solar radiation.

These new notions and terms in science each have a different degree of significance. The notion of living matter has invaded the very structure of natural sciences. It has made the vast world of living organisms, the world of botanists, zoologists, and microbiologists, an object of a quite different geological science. Geology has drawn from biology a new geological factor that had never been included into its competence, and which is, as it has turned out, the crucial one among the other, traditional, geological factors changing the planet’s face. Now, botanists and zoologists as well as microbiologists are able to consider their objects from a different standpoint, that of their geochemical function in the biosphere.

Vernadsky circa 1911

Vernadsky’s work on the role of living matter in Earth’s history did not stop at this point. With his mind’s eye he managed to see the part of living matter that, though relatively small, was extremely important from the standpoint of geology: the living matter of humans. Before civilizations appeared, the human population of the Earth had not differed from the whole mass of higher organisms in its biogeochemical role. But it began to manifest itself as an essentially new natural force in Mesopotamia, Chaldea, and Athens, in the school of Plato, in the philosophy of Democritus, Aristotle, and Socrates, in the teachings of Ptolemy, and then, with an increasing crescendo, in the teachings of Copernicus, Bruno, Newton, Darwin, and Einstein. I should add Vernadsky to the list, too. Of course this list is quite relative, and intended only to illustrate Vernadsky’s thought that such a small part of the biosphere generated and is still generating a qualitatively new factor in the development of the biosphere: the rapidly increasing sum of scientific knowledge about the biosphere, about the direction and volume of humans’ productive activity, which had reached the scale of a new geological force.

This empirical fact brought forth another generalization unprecedented in the history of science, but characteristic of the scope of Vernadsky’s mind. As in the case of the global notion of “living matter,” he abstracted the essence from the specific content of the countless specific scientific facts in the numerous particular scientific disciplines. In this vast multitude of scientific data he saw a certain general essence and called it “scientific thought.” All the diversity of science of all times and nations was generalized into “scientific thought,” like all the diversity of life into “living matter.” By this name he denoted this qualitatively new and, again, geologically significant product of biosphere development as a generalized and independent force on a geological scale, this time produced by an extremely small quantity of the planet’s living matter – that of humans.

In his notion of “scientific thought” or “scientific mind” he saw not an encyclopedia of science, but a generalized, average motion of human thought as part of the planet’s development – its geological history. That is why he collected his unpublished notes under the title “Scientific Thought as a Planetary Phenomenon,” which he failed to complete although he considered it his principal book. These notes were later published under the same title (Mysl, 1991).

Taking into consideration the rapid increase of human activities affecting the biosphere, and the anticipation of their further increase, Vernadsky came to a conclusion about the appearance of a new qualitative state of the biosphere, in which “scientific thought” increasingly becomes the main factor determining its further state and evolution, and is already an independent factor of the biosphere determining and directing the practical activities of humanity in nature and society. He named this new stage of the biosphere’s development the “noösphere,” which means the sphere of science-based intellect, of a new attitude of humanity towards its environment. He believed that the humans of his time had already entered or were entering this new state of the biosphere.

It has been noticed that Vernadsky avoided introducing new terms into science. If necessary, he found them in the scientific literature, which he knew very well. This happened also with the term “noösphere,” which was suggested by the French mathematician and philosopher Le Roy in 1927. Vernadsky used Le Roy’s term in his paper, although he attached to it a more comprehensive meaning.

The creation of the teaching of the biosphere coincided with the situation of that time in traditional geology, when the increasing influence of Man upon Nature had reached the level of a geologic force. That is why the geologists had to find a proper designation for the contemporary stage of the planet’s development in terms of conventional geochronology. Since our school years, we have known that the development of life on Earth passed through long geological eras quite different in content: the Paleozoic (and now, as we have come to know, earlier eras as well), Mesozoic, and Cenozoic eras. The latter formally is expanded to our time, but it also embraces the last millions of years in the Earth’s development when some ancestors of contemporary Man appeared, separate centers of primeval human society were springing up slowly but inevitably, and the first centers of civilization arose, later blending into the allhuman civilization that has embraced the planet from pole to pole.

To designate the contemporary stage of the Earth’s geological history, the term “anthropogenic era” was suggested in 1922 by the geologist A. P. Pavlov, one of Vernadsky’s teachers. Another term for the same purpose, Psychozoic Era, was suggested by the American geologist Charles Schuchert. In both variants the main factor, the backbone of the contemporary geological epoch, was Man. No doubt, the present and future history of the biosphere’s evolution will be written by humankind, though this part of the planet’s “living matter” (biomass) is insignificant in its percentage of the total biomass. I cannot say how it will act on our long-suffering biosphere. Maybe ichthyosauruses will not be the last once powerful but now extinct species of Earth’s inhabitants.

Vernadsky could have meant this when he wrote as early as 1902 about the great responsibility of scientists for their activities: “At present in the field of exact knowledge, we are standing on the border, on the verge of great discoveries…. Cannot the forces discovered by nature be used to do evil and harm?” Later, in 1922, he put it more definitely:

We are approaching a great revolution in humanity’s life, which cannot be compared to anything in the past. The time is coming when Man will be able to control atom energy, a source of power that will give him an opportunity to build his life as he pleases…. Will he be able to use this power, to direct it to food, not to self-destruction? Is he mature enough to manage this power which is inevitably to be given to him by science?

The reader will understand the power of Vernadsky’s anticipation, taking into account that these words were written when physicists, including Niels Bohr’s “brain center,” did not even think about the actual use of atomic energy.

Vernadsky on vacation in Peterhof, 1931

But let us return to geochronology, with which we were discussing the name of our current geological era. In the literature, one can come across attempts to compare or even oppose the names “anthropogenic” and “psychozoic” era to the notion of the noösphere. This is an obvious misunderstanding. These notions are incomparable in principle, since they lie in different planes of thinking. They belong to different “fields of reality,” in Vernadsky’s terms. The notion of the noösphere, as well as that of the biosphere, lies outside geochronology. Vernadsky’s “biosphere” embraces all the geological eras related to the activities of living matter since Precambrian time, to which the first manifestations of the activity of micro-organisms in the ancient ocean date back. This means that this notion embraces all geological eras and cannot refer only to their last stages. The notion of the noösphere has nothing to do with geochronology. It means only the new, contemporary stage of development of the biosphere. At this stage, the global cycle of the planet’s matter and the transformation of solar energy in the Earth’s envelopes become essentially dependent on the increasing sum of knowledge – the scientific and subsequent practical activities of mankind. Thus the noösphere should be understood not as something new, but as the present, current state of the terrestrial biosphere in the contemporary geological era, no matter whether it is called “psychozoic” according to Schuchert, or “anthropogenic” according to Pavlov.

vernadsky as historian

The history of natural science, and of science in general as the history of the human scientific mind, was the second great scientific interest of Vernadsky. The work done by him in the field of natural sciences seems to be sufficient for several scholars. But he also was one of the twentieth century’s most outstanding historians of science. Working at his specific problems of crystallography, mineralogy, and geology, he constantly went beyond the limits of the studied area to the vast spaces of the greater history of knowledge, and not accidentally but quite consciously:

More and more am I carried away by the idea of devoting myself seriously to the history of science. But it is hardly possible: I feel a lack of education and an insufficient power of mind for such a task. Such work will take up many years, as I shall have to prepare for it for a long time. (From a letter to his wife N. V. Vernadskaya, 1893).

But this was not mere intention. In 1902–1903 he delivered lectures on the history of natural science at Moscow University which later were published as a separate book based on the archive records. Here he reveals himself not only as a professional investigator of the history of specific areas of the natural sciences, but also as an outstanding theoretician in a field of historic knowledge that was still nascent.

The very first pages of Essays on Geochemistry show Vernadsky as an historian. His works in general are noted for the scrupulous search for and descriptions of the historic predecessors of his own or other ideas, which, unfortunately, is not characteristic of most scientists of the present-day generation (though it is always characteristic of real scientists).

I shall give one of his notes to Essays on Geochemistry as an example of his attention to the history of scientific thought and to particular scientists. This note is devoted to a Croatian scientist of the eighteenth century, R. J. Boscovich:

R. Boscovich – Jesuit and citizen of the Dubrovnik Republic. Not an Italian, as it is sometimes stated, and against which he had always protested…. He became a French citizen in 1773, and passed several years (1773–1782) in Paris as an academician and Director of “Ortique de la Marine.” Being a Jesuit, he had numerous friends and influential enemies (including d’Alembert). It is interesting to note the sharply opposite estimations of his scientific importance in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. For us he is one of the greatest scientists; but in 1841 an outstanding astronomer, F. Arago, considered him “a person to whom Lagrange and d’Alembert related with great contempt” and “a mediocre foreigner” (F. Arago, Oeuvres completes, ii, p. 139–140, 1854). The interest in Boscovich has begun to increase since the middle of the nineteenth century in connection with the rise of the new physics; but it had never flagged in the previous century either.

This small note reveals Vernadsky’s typical approach to historic material, the scrupulous manner of looking into the personality of a scientist, the conditions of his work and his scientific and social surroundings. Of course it was promoted by the fact that he read in fifteen modern languages – all the Slavonic, Roman and German languages. No doubt he knew the classical ones, too.

thinker

Vernadsky was well-read in the issues of philosophy. He studied and knew not only the philosophical systems of the West, but also those of ancient India and China. He did not think it possible for himself to prefer any philosophical system he knew, and thus he remained a skeptic. He contended that the foremost task of a scientist, studying reality, is accomplished not by philosophy but by empirical science, by the specific facts it uncovers, and by empirical generalizations based on these facts.

Vernadsky, Moscow 1940

He considered the notion of an “empirical generalization” to belong to the highest category of scientific cognition, unlike scientific hypotheses and theories, which always turn out to be temporary. As a specific example of an empirical generalization of everlasting significance, he gave the Periodic Law of Chemical Elements discovered by Mendeleyev. To this we can now add his own empirical generalizations, such as the ideas of “living matter” and “scientific thought,” which need no proof. His teachings on the biosphere and the noösphere may probably also may be counted as such.

Vernadsky wrote a lot about the significance of science as a whole; scientific hypotheses and theories on the one hand, and of empirical generalizations on the other hand. He noted the lack of philosophical understanding concerning the issue of the place of empirical generalizations in contemporary cognition theory, and was the first to put forward this problem, which has not attracted the attention of philosophers up till now.

The volume of Vernadsky’s manuscripts on philosophical issues is large enough, but these papers were never published during the author’s life. He did not intend them for publication, since, it seems to me, he perfectly understood their discrepancy with the officially cultivated dialectic materialism, which had acquired the status of State Philosophy.

Vernadsky had always stressed the distinct difference between the cognitive potential of philosophy and that of the empirical sciences. But even in the very first manifestations of the ancient philosophical mind, he saw the dawn of scientific knowledge. He wrote in one of his letters of 1902:

I look at the meaning of philosophy in the development of knowledge in quite a different way than most naturalists, and attach to it great fruitful significance. I think these are aspects of one and the same process, aspects that are absolutely indispensable and inseparable. They can be separated only in our minds. If one of them decays, the other will stop growing too.”

And here are words from his 1902 lecture, “On a Scientific Worldview”:

Never in history have we observed science without philosophy, and studying the history of scientific thought, we see that throughout all the time of its existence, philosophical concepts and philosophical ideas have permeated science as an indispensable element.

This is an example of his own philosophical reflections from his student’s diary of 1885:

What is time and space? These are problems that throughout the ages have interested the human mind in the form of its most brilliant representatives…. No doubt, time and space do not exist in nature separately; they are inseparable. We know not a single phenomenon that covers no time and no space. Only for logical convenience do we imagine time and space separately, only because our mind is used to doing so while solving problems.

In reality we see time and space separately only in our imagination. To what do these inseparable parts belong? They belong to the only thing existing, to matter, which we divide into two basic coordinates: time and space.

These words were written more than a quarter of a century before Professor Minkovsky, at the Mathematical Congress in Cologne in 1908, overwhelmed listeners by his new ideas about the single, indivisible concept of space-time, about time as the fourth dimension of space. Such was the force of Vernadsky’s anticipating thought in a field that was not even his specialty.

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