Physics of Scale Activities

Patashinski Interview, part I
 

Interview with Alexander Z. Patashinski

Interview recorded by PoS collaborators Babak Ashrafi, Karl Hall, and Sam Schweber at Northwestern University, Evanston, Illinois, 10 July 2002.

PoS

    Maybe we should start at the beginning. Are you from Moscow?

Patashinski

    No, but I spent a few years in Moscow. I was born in the Byelorussian city Vitebsk in 1936. In 1941, my mother took me to Novosibirsk (in Siberia), to escape the war. My family stayed in Novosibirsk, but in 1954 I went to Moscow and became a student at the Moscow Institute of Physics and Technology (MFTI).

PoS

    How do you remember your life in Novosibirsk?

Patashinski

    As a good time. I had many friends, participated in sports, gymnastics and boxing. All the Siberian summer pleasures. I felt good in my All-boys High School #99. Life was full of interesting things, although not without difficulties. 1952 was a difficult year because we were Jewish, and my mother was a physician. [In the months before Stalin's death in March 1953, the Kremlin claimed to have uncovered the so-called "Doctors' Plot" led by Jewish physicians.] My mother, Sofia Lipovna Bensman, was known as one of the best physicians in town, the last hope and resort for many people. In 1952, my mother had a heart attack. It was really hard. As for me, I felt some pressures, but I always was deep into something interesting, and not attentive to the rest. I was one of the best students in my school -- I graduated with a golden medal and other honors. But in 1952 I got some negative marks in my school records, in writing. There was a special class meeting to discuss my "behavior," and it appeared that my fault was my nickname, "genius." This was not given by myself -- it was my physics teacher, the same one who later called the class meeting, an aktiv of Komsomol or whatever. It happened that in a lesson, I promptly offered a solution of a problem he had just formulated, and in surprise he just said, "oh, that's where the genius is hiding." This appeared sticky, I got this nickname, and now this became "a violation of moral rules of socialist society." Only much later I realized that this was part of the anti-Jewish campaign of this year, probably a preparation for expelling me from the school, because all Jews were expected to be placed in special camps somewhere near Chita. My sin was that I was Jewish (it was the ethnicity, not the religion; we all were kept out of any religious teaching), and I was not hiding my ethnicity.

PoS

    How many Jewish boys were there in school? How many other Jewish students were there in your class?

Patashinski

    In my class, there was only one "explicit" Jew, maybe there also were a few hiding their Jewish origins. Siberia was not too densely populated by Jews at this time, compared to Ukraine or Byelorussia. More Jews arrived later in 1952. Before this general concentration camp idea died with Stalin's death, preparations for more repressions were underway, and many Jews from central parts of the Soviet Union were deprived of their positions and sent to Siberia. As far as I know, nobody hurried to give them their positions back when the accusations of 1952 were lifted later. Before Stalin's death in 1953, it would have been practically impossible for me to apply and get accepted into MFTI, which was a really difficult institution to get into for anybody. In 1954, this became possible, although the acceptance barriers were kept high, and for Jews even higher.

PoS

    In 1952, were you expelled?

Patashinski

    No, I was not, but preparations were made. Another teacher also insisted on expelling me, but the school principal, Michail Terentievich Mitasov, interfered, and stopped the process. It was a feature of Russian culture at that time that there were activists that would anticipate the wishes of central authorities and act correspondingly, but there were others who silently or even vocally opposed these actions, in spite of known dangers. I was lucky to have teachers who liked me and protected me. Our Siberian life wasn't easy, it was poor: not enough money, not enough material stuff. From the beginning of the war, my father was in the Red Army; he fell in 1944. Mother was alone to feed us all, and she tried to do whatever she could, but her salary, the salary of a physician in the state-run system, was low. At the beginning of her practice in the thirties, my mother was a rising medical star, working in a large military hospital. In 1937, her father and my grandfather, Lipa Bensman, was imprisoned as an "enemy of the people", and that resulted in big difficulties for all of his children.
    Not all teachers were like my 8th-grade class supervisor, who later made an administrative career in the Pedagogical Academy. I was lucky to have very good teachers in my school and later in my university; I was even more lucky that in my life the bad teachers were rather the exception than the rule. In Russian schools, you have a class mentor, a teacher who is supervising your class. The supervisor of my class from the 5th to the 7th grade (corresponding to Junior High in America) was Nadezhda Grigorievna Anisimova, and she was good to all her students, and very good to me. But in 1952 I was in the 8th grade. In 1952, there was a school meeting in my school, with all the students and teachers sitting in a huge assembly room and listening to speakers. Suddenly, Nadezhda Grigorievna took the stage and gave an emotional talk, recalling a story of Maxim Gorky about a Jewish boy, with words at the end like "... and now when Jewish people are again being accused of all sins and killed..." You have to understand how brave she had to be to speak that way, and how high was the risk for her.

PoS

    And your father?

Patashinski

    My father had, after 1917, difficulties because he wasn't of the "right" class. I was told, without details, that before 1917 my father's family had properties in Vitebsk. After 1917, everything was taken away, and my grandmother, Rachil Meerson, was deprived of all civil rights. As you know, in the twentieth century Russian and world history had a series of dramatic events. The October Revolution, wars, and waves of terror put a toll on my family. So our Siberian life was very poor -- we occupied a small room in somebody's apartment, had eleven square meters' living surface, and there were five of us and not enough room for all of us to lay down, so I slept in the kitchen.

PoS

    Five because you have brothers and sisters?

Patashinski

    I have a sister Isabella (she's now in Israel), born in 1941. The grandmothers were with us. I grew up in a family destroyed by disasters, my mother working too hard and always coming home too late. My grandmother (my mother's mother Rachil Timkin) was very loving, and taught me a lot of values. I tried many things in my life. I tried to be a singer, not without success, but I had not worked hard enough to pursue this line. I was a painter, I was a boxer, I was a lot of difficult stuff.

PoS

    What kind of painter?

Patashinski

    Mostly graphic arts, some sculpture. I helped a professional painter to make these large paintings for demonstrations, which is not painting, actually -- you have an officially endorsed post-card you have to enlarge. I returned to painting some time later, and given the opportunity I would like to continue.

PoS

    Who interested you in science? When did you discover science? It was clear in high school that you were exceptional in physics and mathematics?

Patashinski

    It probably was, although I spent a lot of time in sports and literature. I was the school's poet, and published in posters (wall-newspapers). To be good in physics and mathematics was simply in the nature of my family. I was taught by all my relatives, by my mother, by my uncles, Josef Bensman (a navy commander) and Boris Bensman (economics professor), when they visited us, that my father was a mathematical "star", never having any difficulties in mathematics. About the end of the 5th grade, I became curious about math. I got a handbook in elementary mathematics, I read and re-read this handbook chapter by chapter, and it appeared to me more and more interesting. This gave me an initial mathematical background. In the 6th grade, I bought, without mother's permission, a college textbook, by Kudriavtsev and Demidovich, in higher mathematics. My mother got afraid, she took me to a psychiatrist, and the psychiatrist testified that I was absolutely normal and had no problems my mother was afraid of. I re-stole that book from my mother (she had hidden it somewhere), and for some time this became my favorite reading. At the end of the 6th grade, I had comprehension of the mathematics taught in the high school, and of some other parts. Probably even earlier, I found a book on physics, with covers and some pages missing. This book was my favorite reading and escape, and I made devices I saw in the book, or invented, telescopes, microscopes, electrical motors, later radios, using stuff I could find. Later, I found that the book was the Moscow University textbook in general physics written by Frish and Timoreva. And, of course, I owned and read all the Perelman books--a collection of simple stories and problems in physics and mathematics. I will never forget when the glass vacuum tubes in my first tube radio began to glow for the first time.
    In Siberia of the 1940s and 1950s, there were only a few things you could do. You could do some skating and skiing in the winter, and other sports, but the rest of the time is yours to spend, and you don't have to do your school homework, sure, because you already know everything that is taught. Most of my teachers were so kind as to forgive me the written homework. Normally they ask you, in Russia, to go to the blackboard and show how you solved this problem. When asked, I would have a glimpse in the exercise book, and then write the solution on the blackboard. But if there was a challenging problem around, it would be brought to me. Then I would turn on and work as long as the problem allows. I was really happy when I got special exercise books in math and physics from the Moscow Institute of Physics and Technology (MFTI), full of interesting and difficult mathematical and physical problems. This was my highest pleasure in the last year in school, to solve them. That helped me later when I had to pass the MFTI admission exams.

PoS

    But when you go to university, it's clear what you want to do?

Patashinski

    No, not at that time. I had no special plans of any kind, I was just curious to look around and see what happens where. I had the gold medal, and thus I was entitled to apply to almost any university. My mother thought for me to stay in Novosibirsk. At a graduation party, I met a girl from a neighboring school, and she managed to convince my mother to allow me to go to Moscow, and we went to Moscow together. I passed the MFTI admission tests; sadly enough, she did not pass the tests in her university, and returned back to Novosibirsk. I became a student of PhysTech, the MFTI. To follow my father's steps, I had to become an electrical engineer. I liked the labs, and spent a lot of time there, more than required. PhysTech had very good labs. Usually, the teachers in the lab liked me, but there were also those who disliked me, maybe due to my faults. I was lucky to get support in critical moments. In the first university years, it was Emmanuel L. Fabelinskii, now famous for his work in physical optics, who stood at my side.

PoS

    He was one of your early teachers at the PhysTech (MFTI)?

Patashinski

    Yes. MFTI was a very special place to study, I know no analogies. No expense was spared to hire the best Soviet scientists to be our teachers. The number of students accepted each year grew rapidly over time, but in 1954, the number of famous teachers seemed to be larger than the number of students. It was fate that I did not have to apply to MFTI until a year after Stalin's death. After the five admission exams, a special commission, headed by the Rector, General Petrov, interviewed me in order to decide whether to accept me or not. I was one of only a few people who passed all exams without losing any points, and I had a gold medal from the school and I was a boxing champion of my large Siberian city, and other stuff. The difficult question was, "Why are you Jewish?".

PoS

    What did you answer?

Patashinski

    Oh, I had expected this question. I had the answer from a book I read: "I'm Jewish because my mother is Jewish, my father is Jewish, my cat is Jewish and my dog is Jewish." This was my answer. It wasn't clear after that if they would accept me. My friends decided just to kick out all the windows in the building if I was not accepted. But when the day of acceptance came and I came to the office, the secretary of the committee just waved her hand in a friendly greeting, and my friends went away, probably disappointed.

PoS

    How long were you in Moscow before you were accepted?

Patashinski

    Abut a month or two. I came, probably, in June, and the acceptance exams in MFTI were scheduled in July or early August, earlier than in other places, to allow those not accepted to try with other universities.

PoS

    And these exams were physics and mathematics, or?

Patashinski

    For a gold medallist, three exams in mathematics, and two in physics, written and oral; for others, additional exams in chemistry, in Russian language and literature, and probably in history and foreign language.

PoS

    So by that time you knew it was going to be either physics or mathematics, or physics, strictly physics?

Patashinski

    It was important that it had some engineering flavor. I had chosen the Department of Radio-Physics--my father had had ties to electricity and radio.

PoS

    What did your father do?

Patashinski

    As I mentioned, my father Zakhar had no rights to normal higher education in USSR, but due to the deficit of educated engineers in the 1930s, he had a job as an electrical engineer, and learned extramurally, which was not forbidden to him. He got his engineering diploma just before he went into the army, in 1941. I was told he was brilliant in math and could do many technical things with his hands. I actually can't remember his image because I was not even five when he went to the army, and he died from wounds in 1944. He was a communications officer in a special howitzer regiment.

PoS

    So in Moscow, what happened when you went to the Institute? What courses did you take?

Patashinski

    PhysTech, the Moscow Institute of Physics and Technology, was a very special educational vehicle. The intensity of learning, especially in the first 4 years was well above what was allowed in other universities. You had to pass a special medical test to prove that you would be able to hold the load. Mathematics was taught at a good university level for applied mathematicians, and experimental physics, and engineering, a lot of lab work, and a lot of other stuff, and Marxist-Leninist philosophy, and a foreign language too. I chose German, because the language in my family was Yiddish, and my paternal grandmother actually spoke German rather than Yiddish, I don't know why.

PoS

    How many in the class when you started?

Patashinski

    In the freshman class, there were about 30 Radio-Physics students accepted in 1954. This went down to about 20 at the end because some would not make it and had to go to other institutions, to Moscow University, the Bauman Institute, or whatever.

PoS

    That's for the Radio Technology department?

Patashinski

    There was a Radio-Physics Department, and a Radio Technology Department, too, and Aeromechanics, and Physical Chemistry. About 150 students were accepted to all four departments in 1954.

PoS

    For example, in the mathematics course, how many would there be in a math class? In the classroom, how many students would there be?

Patashinski

    The students were free to attend or not attend lectures, except for the mandatory Marxist-Leninist courses, and language classes. But you had to pass exams and exercise tests. Normally, students were assigned into groups of about ten students for exercise training. This was separate from lectures that were given in a large auditorium for all of us. Our lecturer in mathematical analysis was a famous mathematician, Professor Mark A. Neimark, a well-known algebraist. At some point, when I attended his supplemental classes in differential equations, he suggested that I become his student and a mathematician. I wanted to become an engineer at that time, I didn't want to become a mathematician. General physics was lectured by Professor Gabriel Gorelik. In 1957, he threw himself under a train, people whispered this was because of disagreement with politics. In this summer, Moscow students, and especially MFTI students, were sent to Kazakhstan to help in the Virgin Lands. The hidden reason for that expulsion was that there was an International Youth Festival in Moscow, and it was seen as good to avoid us contacting foreigners.

PoS

    I'm sorry, why were you sent to Kazakhstan?

Patashinski

    I, and many of my friends, thought it was a desire to prevent us contacting foreigners. A lot of foreigners were expected to attend the International Youth Festival in Moscow in 1957. Those students who tried to somehow avoid going to Kazakhstan were punished severely, in many cases expelled from MFTI. I went to Kazakhstan, and I worked in these fields and it was a pleasure, but when we understood the lies that lay behind keeping us in Kazakhstan for the entire summer instead of doing something else, there was an attempt to protest. This almost ended up in big troubles for me when we returned to MFTI. I was warned, on time, by friends, and my friends and other students made it impossible for the guy (Kudinov) who was the party-assigned leader of our group in Kazakhstan, to make public accusations in a meeting of all students. There was actually nothing I could be really accused of, it was only my opinions and my stance, so to say. The time was the Khrushchev "thaw," a more democratic time, and for a short period one got new opportunities to survive.

PoS

    At what point did you switch over to becoming a physicist?

Patashinski

    Actually, in MFTI we all were trained to become physicists of a kind. I graduated from MFTI as a Physical Engineer. The MFTI engineers were physicists specially taught and trained to generate new ideas and communicate to those who make real things, to hardware specialists, and do this on the fundamental and highest available level of basic science. The idea in organizing MFTI (in 1948) was to pick the best students available in the country and train them to lead in competition with the West in military and important industries. This training included work in labs, in and outside MFTI, well- equipped with anything available in the world. We were permitted the risk to break the devices we were working on. This was, I bet, the best education one can imagine, extremely expensive for the state, but very good for us. In the U.S., I am doing the job I was educated and trained for when interacting with science-based institutions, in recent years it has been primarily the Dow Chemical Company.

PoS

    So just for a little bit, what is the kind of mathematics that Neimark would teach you?

Patashinski

    The system of mathematical education was: first to teach us general mathematical ideas and formalisms, beginning with abstract spaces and objects in those spaces. Definitions, objects and operations in abstract spaces, and then, on this basis, you can easily teach details. Analytical geometry, mathematical analysis, differential equations, Hilbert space, linear operators, groups. Say, if you go to quantum mechanics, that's very important stuff. The only important void, as I now think, in our math education was topology. Topology was not taught, probably because this was not considered something that you can really use in calculations.

PoS

    Where did you learn complex variables?

Patashinski

    Once, in a discussion here at Northwestern with my friend John [Ketterson], I started using a few theorems involving complex variables, and John said "Sasha, do you pretend to have in your university a special course in complex variables." Well, three semesters of complex variables. The Lavrentiev and Shabad textbook plus some other books. The teacher in my group was Nikolay N. Moiseev, in later years a well-known scientist and Academy member. To pass his exam was not easy because in several hours of examination he tried to find my weak points.

PoS

    Somehow you're being trained to be some kind of very high-level engineer, but you gravitate towards theoretical physics.

Patashinski

    A natural process plus chance. You work hard in the lab, and then make a test of the facility, and analyze factors limiting the accuracy of the experiment, and show this to your teacher. Then you hear that "oh, you probably will become a theorist." At first, I hadn't paid too much attention to theoretical courses. We had to take a train to go from Dolgoprudnaja, where the Institute is situated, to Moscow. In my first student years, it was a steam engine. Once in this train, I run into a group of students who went to a special interview. I was told that Academician Kapitza (he was out of exile and returned to his Institute of Physical Problems) wanted to have a group of MFTI students specializing in Low Temperature Physics. Curious, I went with them; after they all had gone through the interview, I was interviewed, too, and accepted. A year later, I met in the train a student who told me that he was preparing himself for the Landau theoretical minimum exam. It appeared that there was a way to see Landau and even talk to him. Well, I and two of my friends got the program and the books, did some exercises, and passed the first Landau exam, math-1. In a few years, I passed seven exams of the Landau theoretical minimum (out of nine); the last two exams were waved for me by Landau himself when I became his student. Landau's theoretical minimum included two math exams, not in proofs and existence conditions, but a test of free and elegant use of any kind of mathematics, including tensors, curved spaces, differential equations, and complex variables. The math-1 included stuff used in mechanics and field theory like ordinary differential equations, the math-2--more sophisticated stuff used in quantum mechanics. There were exams in mechanics, field theory including general relativity and cosmology, quanta, statistical mechanics, hydrodynamics, condensed matter, etc., actually all volumes of Landau that exist now. Not all of them existed at the time I describe, but there were very detailed programs and carefully chosen references.

PoS

    What was your physics education at the MFTI? Before you went to take Landau's exam, what was your physics education?

Patashinski

    MFTI program was my physics education, a lot of physics and mathematics. I had nothing to add.

PoS

    In other words, your engineering education was your physics education.

Patashinski

    Yes, it was six years of intense studies. I would rather say my physics education included a lot of engineering.

PoS

    By the time you've finished MFTI, you had, for instance, learned Gorelik's Oscillations?

Patashinski

    This was a small part of the large (about three years, six semesters) General Physics program, this part was probably taught in the fourth semester, lectured by Gorelik himself. There were also, besides the general physics program, courses in analytical mechanics (Felix Gantmacher lecturer), electrodynamics (Gorelik), quantum mechanics, statistical mechanics, and then special parts of physics and applications for student groups according to their specializations. All parts of physics were taught, plus applications and labs, a lot of lab work. We had lectures from 9am to 1pm, then exercise and labs from 2pm till 6-8pm, so that in six years all parts of mathematics and physics were covered with some overlap, plus engineering courses like materials strength, plus lab, workshops, etc.

PoS

    What kind of books, for example, in physics, Landau's?

Patashinski

    In general physics, it was Papaleksi (Moscow University textbooks, in several volumes), Shpolskii for atomic physics, Landsberg for optics, and a lot of other books, including Landau lectures in general physics that I never saw published outside the Institute. Landau's Course of Theoretical Physics was not especially recommended, actually, because there were other books considered as more effective for students. Skanavi's Dielectrics, Tamm's Electrodynamics, Mathematical Analysis by Fichtengolz (three large volumes), Smirnov's Mathematical Analysis in 5 volumes, Petrovskii's Differential equations, Lavrentiev and Shabad in complex variables, Gelfand in linear algebra, Mishlin in integral equations, Gnedenko and Ventzel in probability theory, etc. We had special theoretical physics tutors for analytical mechanics, quantum mechanics, statistical physics and other courses; those tutors were usually younger than the lecturers, but known scientists with higher degrees. There were many hours of exercise for each lecture hour. I normally would combine this with reading Landau and Lifshitz.

PoS

    Do you remember what text they used for quantum mechanics and statistical physics?

Patashinski

    In quantum mechanics, Landau and Lifshitz was the best text for me and some others, but it was also Leonard Schiff's book, probably, and, maybe later, the book of Dirac; Shpolskii was a crack course in quantum mechanics.

PoS

    What about statistical mechanics?

Patashinski

    For statistical mechanics, it was Landau and Lifshitz, of course, and I can also mention German authors translated into Russian, and a book by Levich. There are many good science books in Russia, domestic and translations, some are better, some worse. They were published without consideration of cost and profit, at state expense.

PoS

    At that stage you had heard of Landau and...

Patashinski

    If you are in the Institute for Physical Problems (the Kapitza Institute), as I was at this time, you could not avoid hearing about Landau, the head of the theory department.

PoS

    Before, when you were first making your way into physics.

Patashinski

    In Siberia, I have no recollections. In MFTI, Landau was a very popular name. The names of Kapitza, Landau, Lavrentiev, and of other famous Professors of MFTI and MGU (Moscow State University named for Lomonosov; at the beginning, MFTI was a special Department of MGU) were among those frequently mentioned by students.

PoS

    I mean, before, you mentioned the path is taken by something pushing you.

Patashinski

    This was rather natural; I was always either talking about experiments or doing them, making a mathematical model of what's going on and solving it and so on. Normally the end was "O.K., you probably would go to become a theorist".

PoS

    So it's contingency, it's an accident that, because you met people...

Patashinski

    I could, probably, have avoided this. I prepared my experimental graduation work on Helium3 under Klavdia Zinovieva's supervision in the Peshkov lab of the Kapitza Institute, and everything was fine, but I still had about a year and a half of my university time left. I didn't want to skip this, because of absolute uncertainty about what I would do then.

PoS

    Once you have taken the exam, the Landau minimum, and you're accepted...

Patashinski

    The nine Landau minimum exams had nothing in common with my university program, I had no practical ideas or plans related to these exams. I went through all the courses and labs, this included a lot of experiments. The idea of MFTI education was to be involved more and more in the scientific life of the "base" institute, the Kapitza Institute in my case, as a scientist. In the fourth year, I was sent to the Peshkov lab. We assembled a facility to test superfluidity in He-3 by using the amount of this gas collected in the Kapitza Institute, and benefiting from some new pumps. There was, as I know now, no hope to succeed because we were able to go in the best case down to about 1.5 K, and this is way too high for He-3 superfluidity. Still, this would be an experiment I actually could have used as my graduation work, published, and probably extended and modified the experiments to reach a PhD. In the meantime, I passed at least half of the Landau exams, and I had two friends who had done the same, Lydia Anziferova and Alexander Lazarev. We were interested in theoretical physics independently of what we were doing in the Institute. Then, one day, in the hallway of the Kapitza Institute I ran into Isaak Markovich Khalatnikov, and he said, "Patashinskii, I am organizing a Theoretical Physics group in MFTI, do you want to join this group?" OK, why not! It was an interesting turn of events. Khalatnikov taught us low-temperature theory, superfluidity and superconductivity.
    This was, I guess, in 1957 or 1958. So I was included in this group. For theoretical graduation works, we were sent to the Institute of Theoretical and Experimental Physics (ITEF) to Professor Berestetskii, who interviewed us, and took Lazarev and Anziferova (they were married) as his students; I was sent to Vladimir Vasilievich Sudakov. Sudakov was the very unfortunate driver of the car in the tragic accident in 1962 that ended Landau's activities in physics. It was a disaster for all of us, but even more for him personally. Sudakov, who was close to Landau, involved me first in a theoretical study he was conducting at this time. In about a month, I came up with the solution. He was impressed and told me he no longer felt it right to give me an academic exercise like pi-meson scattering or the like, but he had a Landau manuscript about singularities of Feynman diagrams, and he suggested that I read this manuscript and find something for myself. I took this manuscript, and really found an opportunity to get some new stuff about the location of singularities.

PoS

    Where did you learn QED or Feynman diagrams?

Patashinski

    One of the Landau Minimum exams I passed was QED; this included Akhiezer and Berestetskii and some additional papers. One had to calculate the results of an experiment up to, say, third order in the fine constant, to find the diagrams, write the cross-section, calculate the trace of gamma-matrices, do the integration, etc. In higher orders of QED it's a cumbersome expression with gamma-matrices, you have to know how to deal with that. The MFTI education plus the Minimum gave one a freedom to work in practically any field of theoretical physics. I had skipped, with Landau's permission, the macroscopic electrodynamics exam, and probably because of that I had newer worked in plasma physics. I have done research in high energy physics, quantum mechanics, condensed matter, general relativity, hydrodynamics, and many other fields. I also skipped chemical physics, but I have been working in this field for a rather long time.

PoS

    Let me ask something: Khalatnikov comes to you and says, "I'm organizing a theoretical physics group." There are various people there, Khalatnikov works on many-body theory, he has Sudakov who is high-energy, am I right?

Patashinski

    Theoretical physics was considered as one discipline in the Landau school, the field was not divided into domains with high walls, the disciples had the Theoretical Minimum background, and were able to jump into where a good problem emerges.

PoS

    Are problems in high-energy physics considered more important, more fundamental than, let us say, solid-state physics?

Patashinski

    Theoretical physics is about mechanisms of Nature and how to describe them. These mechanisms are frequently the same for many different parts of physics, and the importance of a problem depends on what is currently most interesting. Sudakov first gave me a problem in hydrodynamics which in plain English could be described as "could a tornado feed itself from small random perturbations in the atmosphere?" I took Lamb's Hydrodynamics and some journal papers (Landau and Lifshitz was not enough), used the Lamb transformation, and reduced the math problem to that of bound states in a "quantum-mechanical" system described by a Schroedinger equation. The "potential energy" term in this equation was a high order polynomial, with some inequalities between coefficients coming from the original problem, and I spent a lot of time in desperate efforts, but finally managed to understand that, with the actual limitations I had, the system has no discrete states (energy levels). That meant there would be no feeding. And when I brought this to Sudakov, this was a new result, so that in the worst case scenario I had something for a theoretical graduation work, and could risk to take on a new problem. The Landau manuscript I got from Sudakov reduced the problem of finding the position of singularities to that of calculating polyhedrons in pseudo-Euclidean energy-momentum space. In a pseudo-Euclidean space, two points may be at a distance zero but have a huge difference in coordinates. You have to train your geometrical intuition to see what happens in this space. After some time (a month or two) I learned to understand pseudo-Euclidean polyhedrons that have a fixed pseudo-length of sides, but have an infinite distance between some vertexes. I had to design my own mathematical tools to prove my understanding, and the entire construction had way too many parts, so that it was impossible to explain the solution to anyone. The diploma thesis that I had later written on this stuff was about forty pages of hard to read text, with too many details. There were equations that were later called Landau-Bjorken equations, and some pseudo-Euclidean currents on the lines of the graph, and a lot more. The algebraic part of this work, but not the entire work, was later published. I tried with few theorists, including Sudakov, but nobody was able to follow me through the too many details and logical tricks and so on. I was forced, at the end, to find somebody who's a patented "understander". So I went to Landau.

PoS

    And what happened?

Patashinski

    I tried to talk to Landau at the end of his seminar. My first attempt was a disaster. Landau easily found some defects. At this time, I was especially bad at explaining, because I've seen things in my imagination and this was hard to explain in words. Landau was tired by the seminar, and he became angry, he just sent me to disappear. He was very angry about all this stuff, and my friends who saw this were frightened about what I had done. Well, in a week, at the end of the next seminar, I just went to Landau and started again. I had found a way to explain some parts better, and surprisingly Landau even praised some ideas, and then at some point again found a point which was probably not well explained. This time I was sent away much less hostilely. The third time I came to talk, Landau was smiling, the talk lasted for about an hour, and then Landau told me, OK, this is too complex for me to understand the details because I am after the seminar, I'm somewhat tired now, but let's meet tomorrow morning. Call me in the morning, we will meet and talk. We spent the next day talking, from morning to late afternoon. Landau listened without too many remarks, and it was good, and then this was over. I felt very tired, the only question I dared to ask was, "could I use this as my graduation work?" He told me something which I had not understood, something about other people receiving degrees, something which probably was flattering, or else.
    Next week, Khalatnikov met me in the hallway of the Kapitza Institute where I was standing with Sudakov before the Landau seminar. "Landau offers you his personal guidance as his aspirant (PhD student)." This probably was something unusual, I had known no Landau personal students. Sudakov told me very rapidly, "Sasha, accept immediately!" And then there began a short time for me when Landau was more like my father than my teacher. He would meet me in the hallway before the seminar when all participants looked at us, and put his hand on my shoulder and talk to me in a low voice, actually more not about science but joking and giving advice how to behave.

PoS

    When was it that Sudakov gave you Landau's manuscript?

Patashinski

    It was probably the fall of 1958, or early in 1959. The Landau paper was published in ZhETF in 1959.

PoS

    And when was what you're describing now with Landau?

Patashinski

    Probably in early 1959.

PoS

    And what happened to the problem that you found in Landau's manuscript?

Patashinski

    This was not a major breakthrough in high-energy physics, rather a technical problem, mathematically tricky but deemed useful. I solved it, to some extent. When you are doing science, you meet, once in a while, technical problems which you have to solve to move further. I did a technical stuff for a theory, based on [Stanley] Mandelstam's ideas, that was forgotten a few years later. Some experience came in handy later, when in 1963 we (Valery Pokrovskii and I) started a study of He-4 near the onset of superfluidity (the lambda-point). At some point, we got to a tricky mathematical situation with diagrams, Matsubara diagrams for this case. The analysis of the generation algorithm for higher order diagrams, developed in the graduation work, appeared very handy. There is a probability (but I have no facts confirming this assumption) that Landau analysis of analytical properties of Feynman diagrams is related to his attempt to understand fluctuations at the lambda-point, so this could be a return to the source. Anyway, I had my means to analyze an arbitrarily complex Feynman diagram, and I applied this immediately, and we made a small step to a discovery of what is now known as scaling.

PoS

    But it wasn't this problem that you--

Patashinski

    No, it was not. What I studied were positions of singularities of Feynman diagrams in elementary particle theory. But to solve this mathematical problem I had to find a generation algorithm to analyze the structure of an arbitrary complex Feynman diagram.

PoS

    That first problem, you didn't use that for your kandidatskaia [PhD] degree, or no?

Patashinski

    Not all of the solution. It was too hard to describe some, mostly geometrical, parts of the construction, and nobody would understand me. Some parts, algebraic, were published, in cooperation with Sudakov and Rudik, in JETP, and even presented (by Lev Okun', we were not allowedto go abroad) at the International Rochester conference. This part was part of my thesis.
    In the summer of 1961, I moved to Siberia, having spent near Landau only one year and few months. The reason for going to Novosibirsk was: I had a child, I had no financial support, my mother and sister were in Novosibirsk and there was no hope to bring them to Moscow. My PhD stipend at the Kapitza Institute would not be enough even for renting an apartment in Moscow. In 1960, the newly created Siberian Division of the Academy offered me incredibly nice conditions: I continue to stay in Moscow with Landau, as a scientist of the Siberian Division. Landau signed some special agreement with the Siberian Division (I saw it in my file later) that he will be my supervisor. I was given a room to live in Moscow with my wife Nadya and son David, and a salary for me and even a salary for my wife, without duties for her. After a little more than a year in Moscow, we moved to Akademgorodok, a new city built for scientists near Novosibirsk, to occupy an apartment given to me, a much better one than I was entitled to at this point of my career. During the months after moving, I had frequent trips to Moscow, to meet with people and attend the Landau seminar.
    In Academgorodok, I met Pokrovsky. At that time, in high-energy physics new ideas appeared, and I started looking at Regge poles. Listening to D. V. Shirkov talk at a seminar, I got an idea that the quasi-classical approximation might be used to get some useful information about Regge poles. I told this to Pokrovsky. We were not yet friends, but we were known to each other -- I had seen Valery in the Landau seminars, he was a natural partner, so to say. Valery was a leader of a team of nice and intelligent people, and the director of his Radiophysics Institute was Yury Borisovich Rumer, an extremely attractive personality who soon became my friend. When later I told Valery about quasiclassics, Pokrovsky, without words, took out of a bookcase a thick (40 pages at least) typed manuscript and told me that a few years ago, he and Khalatnikov, and independently Landau in parallel, tried to solve the problem of quasi-classical scattering in three dimensions by summing up partial waves, but for some reason they stumbled (Landau, too!), and then the problem was declared unsolvable.
    Valery gave me this manuscript, and from this manuscript I understood that they had discovered Regge poles years before Regge, but had not found any use for them, probably because a lot of things (cross-symmetry, analyticity, and other ideas of the quantum field theory) was simply missing. Pokrovsky was not a high-energy physicist, he studied in Kharkov and didn't go through the Theoretical Minimum exams -- he's universally educated in physics but this was not his field. To that time, he had done a lot of work in antennas, non-relativistic quantum mechanics, and condensed matter theory. My experience was not as good in these parts of physics, so I had to test many mathematical things by myself. This was a Landau idea, that you can't learn all necessary mathematics but rather learn how to invent mathematical methods for each problem you have, you run on principles rather than facts. In one point of the manuscript I found a disagreement with what I thought is right. OK, there's a discrepancy here, the traditional definition from the Landau book violates analyticity for complex values of the angular momentum variable. After this obstacle was eliminated, there were many other to overcome, but at the end we were able to solve the problem, and published the results in several papers, with Khalatnikov as co-author. Unfortunately, in some parts the mathematics is somewhat cumbersome. We did it, and in the course of this work Pokrovsky and I became well-adjusted to each other. It was hard work, not everything went easy, there were breakthroughs in math we had to make. At the end of 1962, we had done the job and come to Moscow. It seemed that in the Landau circle everybody had known that Landau wanted to solve this problem. We found the solution.
    In the course of explanations of the solution, and following discussions, and chats, I asked Gor'kov and Abrikosov a question, or maybe this was a declaration, "Now that we have solved this, well, there is a known problem of second-order phase transitions, why don't you solve this problem, you are so strong, so great here. If you don't solve it in the nearest future, we will do it."

PoS

    Who said that?

Patashinski

    I did. I felt some kind of a moral right to make this statement, and it has some prehistory for me.

Continue reading part II of the interview.