Tuesday, August 5, 2008

Famous Physicist Dies

Alexander Solzhenitsyn died late Sunday (3 August 2008) at his home.

Given the quasi-autobiographical nature of his early books, I should have guessed from The First Circle (the first of his books I read) that he had a scientific background but only learned that he had been trained in physics and mathematics in the obit from the BBC.

The First Circle is the story of a scientist who gets to live a very nice life in the part of the gulag reserved for people who could be of some use to the state. (They not only live better than in the real gulag, but they probably live better than most Soviet citizens at the time.) It raises very interesting questions about the moral choice involved in trading comfort and the technical pleasures of working on something as cool as the very first "voice print" machine when that machine will only be used to send someone to his death in the gulag. The book is loosely based on his own experience, since part of his time in the gulag was in just such a place.

At the time I read it, some chemistry major friends of mine faced that sort of choice when it came to taking a high-paying job working on chemical weapons like napalm. One wonders what was going on in the mind of the man who worked simultaneously on weaponized Anthrax and an Anthrax vaccine - and apparently ended up using that bio weapon against people in his own country.

I recommend the book to any scientist. The wiki article identifies the real people who were the models for the characters in the book.

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