Vladimir Vernadsky Totally Explained

Vladimir Ivanovich Vernadsky (Володимир Іванович Вернадський/Владимир Иванович Вернадский) (- January 6 1945) was a Russian-Ukrainian mineralogist and geochemist whose ideas of noosphere were an important contribution to the Russian cosmism. He is most noted for his 1926 book The Biosphere in which he inadvertently worked to popularized Eduard Suess’ 1885 term biosphere, by hypothesizing that life is the geological force that shapes the earth. He was a founding father of several new disciplines, including geochemistry, biogeochemistry, and radiogeology.

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 Mineralogy. He wrote to his wife Natasha Vernadsky on 20 June 1888 from Switzerland: ť "...to collect facts for their own sake, as many now gather facts, without a program, without a question to answer or a purpose isn't interesting. However, there's 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're allowed to think, are closely tied to general changes which the earth has undergone by the earth with the general laws of celestial mechanics. I believe there's hidden here still more to discover when one considers the complexity of chemical elements and the regularity of their occurrence in groups..."

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.
   Vernadsky 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.
   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's visionary pronouncements were not widely accepted in the West. However, he was one of the first scientists to recognize that the oxygen, nitrogen and carbon dioxide in the Earth's atmosphere result from biological processes. In the 1920s, he published works arguing that living organisms could reshape the planets as surely as any physical force. Vernadsky was an important pioneer of the scientific bases for the environmental sciences.
   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. 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.

Works (selected)

Geochemistry, published in Russian 1924
The Biosphere, first published in Russian in 1926. English translations:
- Oracle, AZ, Synergetic Press, 1986, ISBN 0-907791-11-5, 86pp.
- tr. David B. Langmuir, New York, Copernicus, 1998, ISBN 0-387-98268-X, 192pp.
Essays on Geochemistry & the Biosphere, tr. Olga Barash, Santa Fe, NM, Synergetic Press, ISBN 0-907791-36-0, 2006

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.

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