Tribute to Those Who Changed the World (eBook)
The Global Energy Prize
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EPUB
2019
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1. Auflage
200 Seiten
Bookbaby (Verlag)
978-1-5439-8905-2 (ISBN)
200 Seiten
Bookbaby (Verlag)
978-1-5439-8905-2 (ISBN)
Physicists, chemists, engineers, geologists-though the scientists featured within the pages of this book are different from each other in many ways, there is something they all share. They are energy scientists who made breakthrough discoveries in atomic energy, thermal engineering, semiconductors, and renewable and non-conventional energy. With a shared passion for scientific exploration, dedication to the process of research, and the desire to change our lives, their discoveries are not just scientific advances, but cornerstones of brand new technologies.
Physicists, chemists, engineers, geologists-though the scientists featured within the pages of this book are different from each other in many ways, there is something they all share. They are energy scientists who made breakthrough discoveries in atomic energy, thermal engineering, semiconductors, and renewable and non-conventional energy. With a shared passion for scientific exploration, dedication to the process of research, and the desire to change our lives, their discoveries are not just scientific advances, but cornerstones of brand new technologies. In this exploration of the men and women who made our modern lives possible, author Irina Belasheva pays tribute to those who took on challenges of global magnitude and were awarded the Global Energy Prize.
Physicists, chemists, engineers, geologists-though the scientists featured within the pages of this book are different from each other in many ways, there is something they all share. They are energy scientists who made breakthrough discoveries in atomic energy, thermal engineering, semiconductors, and renewable and non-conventional energy. With a shared passion for scientific exploration, dedication to the process of research, and the desire to change our lives, their discoveries are not just scientific advances, but cornerstones of brand new technologies. In this exploration of the men and women who made our modern lives possible, author Irina Belasheva pays tribute to those who took on challenges of global magnitude and were awarded the Global Energy Prize.
GENNADY MESYATS
Global Energy Prize Laureate 2003
THE MAN WHO COMPRESSED ENERGY
Gennady Mesyats tamed the lightning bolt
Almost once a year, according to statistics, lightning hits a passenger airplane in midflight, and it hardly ever leads to an accident. Today’s aircraft take such incidents quite easily, as they are well equipped to handle atmospheric electricity: each aircraft is tested for the ability to withstand lightning strikes as part of production testing. But for such tests a controlled and “domesticated” lightning is needed. It was Dr. Gennady Andreevich Mesyats, one of the Global Energy Prize laureates, who tamed the lightning bolt. It’s no coincidence that he mentioned that very application of his invention at the awards ceremony.
The family history of the future laureate and academician should have been deemed irreproachable in Soviet times: they lived in the Chernigov Region of present-day Ukraine; his grandparents worked for local landowners and then at the mines of Donbass. In 1908, they left for Siberia, settling in the village of Varlamov-Padun in the Tomsk Governorate. However, in 1938, when Gennady was only two years old, his father Andrey Romanovich fell victim to political repressions and toiled in labor camps in the Far East until the end of WWII.
Thus, the future scientist spent his formative years with his mother only. Those were hard times: the family was deprived of housing for being related to “an enemy of the people,” and Gennady’s mother lost her job. She had to raise her kids alone during wartime… This defined the boy’s character, making him strive to be stronger and better than everyone else. Dr. Mesyats recalls his younger years as follows:
“My life was hard. When I was six, I was the main breadwinner for the family. I knew that I had to bring bread home, even if I had to stand the whole day in a queue to get it. …As a political prisoner’s son was perceived as a pariah, I tried to prove that I was the best. Both at school and at the university, I earned only the top grades.” The fact that he had to struggle to survive since childhood left a mark on the character of the future physicist. When he was already an academician, his son Vadim was studying in the physics department at Tomsk University and got “hooked” on poetry. He was writing, not reading. Mesyats the elder asked journalist Valentin Lukyanin to review his son’s verse thoroughly. “I wanted someone to review his writing and knock some sense into him.” So the literate men reviewed Vadim’s poems and delivered their verdict: the guy had talent, and his poetry was to be published. However, his father set down a condition: “You will work, defend a thesis, and graduate from the department, and then you can decide yourself what to do.” Clearly, he thought that his son needed a stable profession, and never thought that “a mediocre writer” could earn a decent living. The son took after the father, met the condition, and became both a PhD and a man of letters.
Looking ahead, it’s worth saying that the academician’s son Vadim Gennadievich has been a success in the field of literature. He has been honored with many literary awards, such as the Bazhov Prize (2002, for the novel “Electrotherapy”), the Bunin Prize (2005, for the short story collection “Vok-Vok”); a Russian Booker Award (2002, for the novel “Electrotherapy”), the prize of the Union of Russian Writers (2011, for the book of poetry “Gypsy Bread”), the New Voices in Poetry and Prose Award (United States), and others. His works were highly appreciated by Joseph Brodsky, Alexander Zinoviev, and academicians Mikhail Gasparov and Vyacheslav Ivanov.
When Gennady’s father reunited with the family after his imprisonment, life became much easier. First, the war ended, and life got better for everyone in the country. Second, he got a job, and this helped the family a lot. If not for his father, or better to say, if not for his father’s record of convictions, Mesyats would not have become the man he is now. In his younger years, Gennady dreamed of becoming a radio mechanic. He entered the Radio Engineering Faculty of the Tomsk Polytechnic University and studied for nearly two years there…
And then he was simply expelled, as the son of a political prisoner, even though his father had been rehabilitated in 1954. The reason was that the Radio Engineering Faculty was becoming more and more involved in classified areas, and while Mesyats was studying there it acquired the status of a sensitive facility “with special operational procedures.” Fortunately, the Rector of the Tomsk University, Alexander Vorobyev, as he himself said, took the talented student “under his wings,” and according to the documents, Mesyats simply “relocated” to the Energy Faculty where Vorobyev had his laboratory. Without this intervention Mesyats would not have become a physicist because the university was only preparing future energy engineers. After the university, it would have been possible to get a job at a power plant or electrical grid, but not in fundamental science. Everything changed in his fourth year.
In the late 1950s, Grigory Vorobyev, a young teacher with only a Candidate of Sciences degree stopped by the dormitory at Tomsk Polytechnic University where Mesyats and the other fourth-year students lived. At the time, Vorobyev was already working with electric pulses as the head of a laboratory at the university’s Nuclear Physics Institute. He realized that the institute needed employees who were young, who could “grow into” their profession. So, right there in the dormitory, he offered students the chance to write their undergraduate thesis not on an academic topic, but on a truly scientific one. The offer presented both opportunity and risk: on the one hand, it was a chance to plunge into real science, but on the other hand, if the research failed, they would risk not having any undergraduate thesis at all, which at that time could have had especially negative consequences.
Mesyats took the risk, choosing as his research topic the generation of high-capacity nanosecond electric pulses. As Gennady Andreevich recalled later, “that offer decided my fate.” Who could have known that a brand new area of physics would grow from a student’s paper… Anyhow, when asked about the beginning of his scientific career, Mesyats honestly responds that it was his undergraduate thesis in his fourth year that provided the first visible result.
Years later, Academician Mesyats described his university work like this: “It was dedicated to the problem of obtaining powerful nanosecond pulses, i.e. high-voltage and heavy current pulses, with a very small duration of about one billionth of a second. Again, a light beam passes thirty centimeters per one nanosecond. The task was to measure to a high degree of precision the speed of development of an electrical discharge in solid-state dielectrics.” It is worth mentioning that this student’s work from the end of the 1950s is still studied with great interest by professors and students at the University of Texas almost a half-century later. Very few term papers ever receive such an honor.
And so, starting from his fourth year at university, the young physicist began working at the forefront of science, and sometimes beyond it.
He managed to complete his undergraduate thesis while undertaking pre-graduation practical training, working at four different scientific research centers over two months. There he obtained new knowledge and ideas, and gained important experience doing experimental work with high currents and plasm. However, as Dr. Mesyats recalled later, it could only provide a general direction of thought and some experience of working with his hands. His field of research was brand new, which meant that researchers had to be “theorists and designers of unusual devices for themselves,” like physicists of an earlier era.
This practical work grew into a graduate thesis, which gave rise to a new theory of high-voltage nanosecond pulses. The power of such pulses, due to the release of large amounts of energy in a short time, can exceed the capacity of all the power plants in the world. As Dr. Mesyats jokes today, he was the first who started working with nanotechnologies, but it was nanoseconds, not nanometers.
His graduate work was soon followed by two genuine and indisputable discoveries, which were officially registered. Even mature scientists can hardly ever boast such an achievement. The phenomenon of explosive electronic emission – an avalanche-type increase of electron emission as a result of anode explosion – is now called the Mesyats Effect. He was able to see in detail what happens when a discharge occurs between a cathode and an anode. It turned out that before a disruptive discharge such as a bolt of lightning, there occur micro-explosions of minor irregularities that always exist in a cathode, and metal fuses, explodes, and throws out fused drops. Thus, physicists saw for the first time how a man-made bolt of lightning strikes, and succeeded in controlling it. By using a special treatment of the irregularities on...
| Erscheint lt. Verlag | 6.12.2019 |
|---|---|
| Sprache | englisch |
| Themenwelt | Naturwissenschaften ► Physik / Astronomie |
| ISBN-10 | 1-5439-8905-5 / 1543989055 |
| ISBN-13 | 978-1-5439-8905-2 / 9781543989052 |
| Haben Sie eine Frage zum Produkt? |
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