Voldemar Smilga
Voldemar Smilga (Rus. Вольдемар Петрович Смилга, 16 January 1929 – 11 March 2009) was a Soviet and Russian theoretical physicist and popular science writer.
Biography[edit]
Voldemar Smilga was born in 1929 in Moscow to a Latvian father and Jewish mother. His parents, Bolshevik activists during the Russian Revolution and Civil War, went on to pursue musical careers. Smilga studied at the Moscow Institute of Physics and Technology from 1947 to 1953. He subsequently worked as researcher at the Institute of Physical Chemistry and at the Kurchatov Institute, and, since the early 1960s, taught at the MIPT. He defended his Candidate of Sciences thesis (under the supervision of B. V. Deryagin) on the electronic theory of adhesion[1] in 1962, and his Doctor of Sciences thesis on the theory of electrical double layers in 1975. He was awarded the title of MIPT Distinguished Professor in 2005.
Smilga (together with I. G. Ivanter) were among the first who understood the power of the muon spin rotation method and suggested to apply it to examine the microscopic electronic properties of condensed matter.[2] Ivanter and Smilga predicted the phenomenon known as two-frequency precession of muonium, which was then experimentally verified.[3]
Smilga was also active as popular science writer. During his lifetime, he published two books: The Advent of Relativity[4] (on the special theory of relativity and the history of ideas that led to its discovery) and In the Search for Beauty (a popular history of the parallel postulate and the birth of non-Euclidean geometry). Originally written in Russian, they were translated into several languages. Smilga's biography of Nikolai Lobachevsky was published posthumously by his family.
References[edit]
- ↑ According to the electronic theory suggested by Deryagin and Smilga, the surface adhesion of two solids is caused by the formation of an electric double layer along the interface and the attraction of positive charges on one side to negative charges on the other.
- ↑ Ivanter and Smilga 1968 (v. inf.) The method is based on a simple idea: microscopic magnetic fields affect the orientation of muon spin which can be detected by asymmetry of muon decay.
- ↑ Gurevich et al. 1971. Registered in the USSR State Inventory of Scientific Discoveries, Patent no. 162, 1975.
- ↑ The English translation was originally published under the title Relativity and Man (Mir publishers, Moscow, 1964).
Selected publications[edit]
- B. V. Derjaguin; V. P. Smilga (1967). "Electronic theory of adhesion". Journal of Applied Physics. 38 (12): 4609.
- I. G. Ivanter; V. P. Smilga (1968). "Theory of the muonium mechanism of depolarization of µ+ mesons in media". Soviet Phys. JETP. 27 (2): 301.
- I. I. Gurevich; et al. (1971). "Two-frequency Precession of Muonium in a Magnetic Field". Soviet. Phys. JETP. 38 (2): 253.
- B. V. Deryagin; N. A. Krotova; V. P. Smilga (1978). Adhesion of Solids. Springer US. Search this book on
- V. P. Smilga; Yu. M. Belousov (1994). The Muon Method in Science. Nova Publishers. Search this book on
- Voldemar Smilga (2021). The Advent of Relativity. World Scientific. Search this book on
- Voldemar Smilga (2018). In The Search For Beauty: Unravelling Non-euclidean Geometry. World Scientific. Search this book on
- V. P. Smilga (2015). Molodye gody Nikolai︠a︡ Ivanovicha Lobachevskogo. M.: Dobrosvet:KDU. Search this book on
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