Lomonosov, Mikhail

Lomonosov, Mikhail Vasilyevich (1711-65) Russian scientist who set up the country s first chemical laboratory. He seems to have been well ahead of his time and is said to have proposed the law of conservation of mass, the wave theory of light, and the kinetic theory of heat well before these important principles were understood in the West. He believed in popular education. 

The Russian atomist, Mikhail Vasilyevich Lomonosov (1711-1765 CE) believed that changes of matter were due to the motions of constituent particles. The particles consisted of elementa that contain no smaller bodies of different kinds. If a corpnscle (a small mass consisting of aggregates of elementa) consisted of the same elementa, it was homogeneous. If the components of the corpuscles were different elementa, the corpuscles were heterogeneous (50). 

In the Soviet Union, the research institutes and organizations of Sevastopol had at their disposal well-equipped research vessels and played a leading role in the studies of the Black Sea. These were, first of all, the Marine Hydrophysical Institute (R/V Mikhail Lomonosov , R/V Akademik Vernadsky , R/V Professor Kolesnikov and the Institute of Biology of the Southern Seas (R/V Akademik Kovalevsky , R/V Professor Vodyanitsky ) of the USSR Academy of Sciences, now the National Academy of Sciences of the Ukraine. In addition, there were the bases of research vessels of the Sevastopol Branch of the State Oceanographic Institute (SB SOI) and the Hydrographic Service of the Black Sea Navy. Sevastopol was also a port of registration for re-... 

The first attempted measurements of the astronomical unit during the 1761 transit were unsuccessful. However, several observers reported a halo around Venus as it entered and exited the Sun s disk. Thomas Bergman in Uppsala and Mikhail Lomonosov in St. Petersburg, independently speculated that the halo was due to an atmosphere on Venus. Eight years later observations of the 1769 solar transit (including those made by Captain Cook s expedition to Tahiti) gave a value of 1 AU = 153 million kilometers, —2.3% larger than the actual size (149.6 million kilometers) of the astronomical unit (Woolf, 1959 Maor, 2000). 

In his theories Lavoisier had been anticipated by a Russian chemist, Mikhail Vasilievich Lomonosov (1711-65) who, in 1756, nearly twenty years before Lavoisier s work on combustion, had rejected the phlogiston theory and had suggested that objects combined with a portion of the air on burning. Unfortunately, he published in Russian, and the chemists of western Europe, including Lavoisier, were unaware of his work. Lomonosov also had startlingly modern views on atoms and on heat, which were fifty to a hundred years ahead of his time. He was a most remarkable man who suffered under the misfortune of having been born in eastern Europe at a time when scientific advance was concentrated in western Europe. 

Gifted with special linguistic abilities, Mikhail Lomonosov learned to read and write at an early age. He went to study in Moscow at the age of 20 against his father s wishes, and on his own slim budget, he... 

Russian scientist Mikhail Lomonosov describes heat as a... 

Mikhail Vasilyevich was a versatile and talented man. During the 1750s he became a scientist of good international repute and became known as the founder of Russian science. He took an active part in the foundation of the university in Moscow in 1755, which today is named after him The Lomonosov Moscow State University. In 1760 he was the first Russian to be elected as a member of the Royal Swedish Academy of Science. The well-known chemist Georg Brandt was Academy President at this time and could welcome his Russian colleague. 

Physical Chemistry was coined as a term in 1752 by the scientific polymath and poet Mikhail Lomonosov [1], but it was recognised and defined as a specific discipline only towards the end of the nineteenth century. Definitions and distinctions were discussed and exemplified by Jean Perrin in his magistral Traite de Chimie Physique of 1903 [2] which clearly defined the overlap between the subjects now known as physical chemistry and chemical physics. In essence both of these fields involved the opening up of chemistry to the techniques and thought processes of physics. Extension of physical chemistry, and its relation to physics, to the sphere of biology became formally recognised 50 years later, as exemplified by the arguments and presentation of Cyril Hinshelwood in his popular tome The Structure of Physical Chemistry , published in 1951 [3]. 

Shiltsev V (2012) Mikhail Lomonosov and the dawn of Russian science. Phys Today 64 40-46... 

Mikhail A. Kuznestov Chemistry Department, BioChemMack S T, Lomonosov State University, bl/11 I ninskie Gory, Moscow 119992, Russia, mkuznestov kge.msu.ru... 

Pavlova and Fedorov, 1984] G. E. Pavlova, and A. S. Fedorov. Mikhail Vasilievich Lomonosov His Life and Work, A. Aksenov, trans, D. Hainsworth, ed, Mir Publishers, Moscow, 1984. 

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