Physicists honored

Author of "Battle on the Road" in the city of physicists

A story of a creative trip

End. Start in № 46

The writer is in search of her main heroine, the Soviet Marie Curie, who she came here mainly for.

- Marie Sklodowska? Yes, of course, - Evgenia Nikolaevna agrees, one of the 13 authors of the discovery of the antisigma-minus hyperon. - But it was half a century ago. Physics is different today. There is a division of labor. Some work with accelerators, others prepare equipment, the third process the results and the fourth, theoreticians, comprehend them. When it comes to laying out lead blocks for radiation shielding, physical strength in the most ordinary sense of the word is required. The place of women is processing results...

From left to right: Yu.M.Kazarinov, Yu.N.Simanov, Galina Nikolaeva, Maxim Sagalovich

- And theory?

- A theoretician needs to have ideas... Only those that have talent can show themselves brightly, but then you have to give up everything...

And then - without names.

- Material conditions are poor. If only there were good canteens... We come home now and it is paradise. And what was it like before Geneva? You come at nine, you leave at nine...

- I was the only girl in the group. They didn't trust me. I fought for independence. As soon as I found a solution, they would join me to a man to strengthen me - help her. And he would cross everything out and offer his own… For three years, I felt like I was being suppressed. I consulted with my friends: what should I do? In response I heard: leave! Otherwise, you're screwed. They'll be covering for you your whole life. And I went to another group where they don't brush off women…

- Some fight for a place in the sun, others give up. Family, children. They're not burning at work. Burn or not burn, but if the child gets sick, you come to work like a plague victim…

Galina Nikolaeva was able to win people over surprisingly fast. People came to her almost as if to confess. Lidiya Tikhonova recalled: "After the conversation, there was a feeling as if she had relieved her soul." Although, what is surprising about that? "Attending physician" - that's what is written on the diploma of Galina Volyanskaya, a graduate of the Gorky Medical Institute that a few years later, took the writer's pseudonym Galina Nikolaeva, after her second husband, civil engineer Nikolay Sinitsyn.

Galina Nikolaeva is in the office of the first Director of the Laboratory of Nuclear Problems.

- We study the interactions of protons with protons... Our task is to reveal the nature of nuclear forces...

M.G.Meshcheryakov touches on a sore subject:

- Science is a great social force. It is well paid for here: cottages, cars, salaries... Many mediocrities are attracted to science. They should be weaned from science, but we cannot. Many do not understand it... Our society excludes barriers to science... But there is a barrier - talent!

Meshcheryakov suggests a thought experiment: imagine that you have a ticket to the Bolshoi Theater, and today, it is not Plisetskaya dancing there, but the secretary of the theater's party committee. Will you go?

- Talented people graduate from Moscow State University, but you can't employ them. All the places are taken. A talentless person is engaged in demagogy, hiding behind a trade union, public organizations - but try to fire him! If a person "can't handle it", then find him a job, find him an occupation that suits his mind. Let him vacate his position... If a person hasn't done anything by the age of 30, he won't do anything. He has too much chalk in his head. I haven't been able to employ a single intern in five years! Hence the stagnation... (and it, let's note in parentheses, was 20 years before perestroika!)

- Passions run high in Dubna! Many contradictions. Sparks fly! There is no complacency here. Not to air dirty linen in public? Nonsense! Let passions run high...

***

...The writer returned to Moscow, but she was in Dubna in spirit and soon, she and Sagalovich were again in the city of physics, celebrating the New Year in the Club of Scientists, among new friends.

The contours of a fictional city similar to Dubna emerged, an international scientific centre similar to JINR developed, literary characters, similar and unlike their Dubna prototypes, began to move and speak in familiar voices. The writer continued to work. And in autumn, she passed away...

Having broken through the chaos of drafts, Sagalovich prepared the first chapter for publication in the magazine "Science and Life". And he wrote a play "The quiet physicists". It was going to be staged in Dubna and even the premiere was scheduled for August 1964, for the Rochester Conference. JINR was ready to pay, but for some reason, the creative team broke up.

There is a song written by Vladimir Vysotsky: "Even if you don't grab a neutrino by the beard and put it in a bottle, it would be great if Pontecorvo took it tighter by the scruff of the neck!" Bruno Maksimovich said that after this song by Vladimir Semenovich, his sons began to treat him with respect.

Maxim Sagalovich came to Dubna twenty years later: "I am walking through a clean, washed, green and flower-filled town of physicists..." He is looking sadly at the cottages where Veksler and Blokhintsev once lived...

But here's what inspires optimism: "The emotional Alexey Tyapkin is unfading, Volodya Kadyshevsky, a doctor of sciences and a professor who a great discovery is expected from any minute, still looks like Apollo... Yesterday's girls-experimenters Zhenya Kladnitskaya, Masha Shafranova, Lida Tikhonova and Lina Okhrimenko defended their theses and became mothers."

And - nostalgically: "Dubna has grown, with its modern buildings it encroaches on Chernaya Rechka and invades the pine forest where we lived in one of the cottages in the summer of 1962..."

Alexander RASTORGUEV