Man of the highest standard

Alexander Mikhailovich Baldin obtained high priority results in the field of nuclear physics and elementary particle physics, accelerator physics that earned him a worldwide fame. He was awarded the Lenin, State and other most prestigious prizes, many government awards.

A.M.Baldin and V.G.Kadyshevsky

Alexander Mikhailovich was one of the most insightful and profound physicists of our time that opened new paths in the most relevant areas of microcosm physics. The fate wanted the stormy scientific activity of Alexander Mikhailovich to be interrupted. But those scientists that will work in the areas discovered by Alexander Mikhailovich will always be strongly influenced by him.

Bowing our heads to the largest scientist, Academician Alexander Mikhailovich Baldin, we should pay the highest tribute to his exceptional personality. He was the man of the highest standard. He was characterized by rare courage and willpower. In his youth, of course, it helped him to conquer the peaks when climbing in the mountains, but much later, it played a very important role in his life, when a serious insidious disease crept up on him. And already in the very last weeks that turned out to be the hardest in his life, these qualities also manifested themselves in full. Alexander Mikhailovich was a real fighter, a very decisive, honest, principled man. He tolerated no compromise if it concerned deals with conscience. But he understood people very well and treated them very kindly. Everyone has always felt it. He always supported everyone. Now, saying goodbye to Alexander Mikhailovich, everyone who knew him, at least once had the happiness to communicate with him, of course, they cannot forget his eyes that were always very clear, radiated intelligence, benevolence and it was felt that he was very attentively listening to the interlocutor. After communicating with him, this feeling always remained. If you recall his scientific reports, speeches, you'll see how much energy there was! They were always done by him in an attacking style. He was always convinced of what he stood for.

Alexander Mikhailovich gave many decades of his life to work at the Joint Institute for Nuclear Research. For about thirty years he had headed VBLHEP. After 1997, he became Scientific Leader of the Laboratory. Apparently, with the departure of Alexander Mikhailovich, the era of universal physicists ends that equally had access to the heights of the current theoretical physics and the subtleties of a current physical experiment.

VBLHEP headed by him employed more than a thousand people. Alexander Mikhailovich delved into everything. He developed the scientific research programme of the Laboratory. Synchrophasotron is a legendary proton accelerator, by the way, under his project, there is a signature of Alexander Mikhailovich Baldin. At the suggestion of Alexander Mikhailovich, this machine was redesigned into a core accelerator. Being a world-class theorist, Alexander Mikhailovich put forward and developed a new promising research area - relativistic nuclear physics. Afterwards, he proposed to construct a new accelerator with advanced technology for experimental research in this area. And he did. He achieved it, despite the fact that the hardest years were. Alexander Mikhailovich was a subtle connoisseur of Russian poetry and knew a lot of poetry by heart. I thought that the famous Nekrasov lines could serve as an epitaph:

Mother Nature! If you didn't sometimes send
Such people into the world,
The field of life would wither.

Speech by Academician V.G. ADYSHEVSKY at a mourning rally in the RAS
4 May, 2001