Matvei Petrovich Bronstein and Soviet Theoretical Physics in the Thirties by Victor Ya. Frenkel & Gennady E. Gorelik

Author:Victor Ya. Frenkel & Gennady E. Gorelik
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Springer-Verlag Wien 2012
Published: 2015-01-01T16:00:00+00:00

Probably it was Bronstein who had introduced the subject into Jazz-band talks; he might have been absent from the memorable dinner at which the article was written.

There is additional evidence — though being meticulous in his references Bronstein never mentioned this particular paper.7

5.2.3. At the Sources of Quantum Relativistic Astrophysics

Bronstein looked for the signs of cGℏ physics not only in general considerations dressed up like a cGℏ diagram. He performed calculations. Some of them can be found in his works on the relativistic astrophysics.

In his article of 1933 [20] on white dwarf theory, he offered a detailed and clear physical discussion of the equilibrium of the gravitating sphere formed by degenerate Fermi gas for the non- and ultra-relativistic cases.8 He was the first to obtain an equation for such a star for the general case when the degree of relativism was changing from the star’s center to its surface [20, p. 99]. He wrote that this equation could be solved through “tiresome calculations”. In 1935 Chandrasekhar made these calculations [296]; he advanced white dwarf theory to quantitative results that he obtained through numerical integration. He also wrote that he had supplied the equation in his preliminary note of 1934 [295]; it was known among the Soviet astrophysicists that it was Bronstein who first arrived at it [92].

However Bronstein’s article, just like Landau’s earlier work [214], did not deal with white dwarfs; what is more, they were never mentioned in them. The very titles indicated that the authors posed themselves a wider task — that of probing the stars’ physical nature. Stars for them were mysterious physical objects; this partly explains why Bronstein never troubled himself with the concrete solution of his equation — he was not a “pure” astrophysicist.

In [20] he began by criticizing Eddington, who tried to describe the stars’ structure without looking at the source of their energy. Then, following Landau, he discussed a gaseous sphere at zero temperature without an energy source. Composed of a classical ideal gas such a star cannot retain its equilibrium. It will contract until the quantum statistics become dominant. In this way Bronstein took as his subject the equilibrium of a sphere of degenerate Fermi gas. It should be noted that at that time it was generally recognized that the result of Landau’s paper was not the critical mass for this configuration

Bronstein wrote that E.C.Stoner was the first to obtain this remarkable result in 1930 [266]; however, Stoner failed to detect any problems in the unlimited contraction of the star with a mass bigger than critical; he believed that heating and radiation would be the only results.

Landau concluded that “all the stars heavier than 1.5 M0 have a domain in which the laws of quantum mechanics (and hence quantum statistics) are violated” because with the mass more than M0 “there is not a force in quantum theory that would prevent the system from contracting into a point”; on the other hand, he continued, “such masses are quietly existing as stars”. He surmised

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