the “noösphere,” which means the sphere of science-based intellect, of a new attitude of humanity towards its environment. He believed that the humans of his time had already entered or were entering this new state of the biosphere.
It has been noticed that Vernadsky avoided introducing new terms into science. If necessary, he found them in the scientific literature, which he knew very well. This happened also with the term “noösphere,” which was suggested by the French mathematician and philosopher Le Roy in 1927. Vernadsky used Le Roy’s term in his paper, although he attached to it a more comprehensive meaning.
The creation of the teaching of the biosphere coincided with the situation of that time in traditional geology, when the increasing influence of Man upon Nature had reached the level of a geologic force. That is why the geologists had to find a proper designation for the contemporary stage of the planet’s development in terms of conventional geochronology. Since our school years, we have known that the development of life on Earth passed through long geological eras quite different in content: the Paleozoic (and now, as we have come to know, earlier eras as well), Mesozoic, and Cenozoic eras. The latter formally is expanded to our time, but it also embraces the last millions of years in the Earth’s development when some ancestors of contemporary Man appeared, separate centers of primeval human society were springing up slowly but inevitably, and the first centers of civilization arose, later blending into the allhuman civilization that has embraced the planet from pole to pole.
To designate the contemporary stage of the Earth’s geological history, the term “anthropogenic era” was suggested in 1922 by the geologist A. P. Pavlov, one of Vernadsky’s teachers. Another term for the same purpose, Psychozoic Era, was suggested by the American geologist Charles Schuchert. In both variants the main factor, the backbone of the contemporary geological epoch, was Man. No doubt, the present and future history of the biosphere’s evolution will be written by humankind, though this part of the planet’s “living matter” (biomass) is insignificant in its percentage of the total biomass. I cannot say how it will act on our long-suffering biosphere. Maybe ichthyosauruses will not be the last once powerful but now extinct species of Earth’s inhabitants.
Vernadsky could have meant this when he wrote as early as 1902 about the great responsibility of scientists for their activities: “At present in the field of exact knowledge, we are standing on the border, on the verge of great discoveries…. Cannot the forces discovered by nature be used to do evil and harm?” Later, in 1922, he put it more definitely:
We are approaching a great revolution in humanity’s life, which cannot be compared to anything in the past. The time is coming when Man will be able to control atom energy, a source of power that will give him an opportunity to build his life as he pleases…. Will he be able to use this power, to direct it to food, not to self-destruction? Is he mature enough to manage this power which is inevitably to be given to him by science?
The reader will understand the power of Vernadsky’s anticipation, taking into account that these words were written when physicists, including Niels Bohr’s “brain center,” did not even think about the actual use of atomic energy.
Vernadsky on vacation in Peterhof, 1931
But let us return to geochronology, with which we were discussing the name of our current geological era. In the literature, one can come across attempts to compare or even oppose the names “anthropogenic” and “psychozoic” era to the notion of the noösphere. This is an obvious misunderstanding. These notions are incomparable in principle, since they lie in different planes of thinking. They belong to different “fields of reality,” in Vernadsky’s terms. The notion of the noösphere, as well as that of the biosphere, lies outside geochronology. Vernadsky’s “biosphere” embraces all the geological eras related to the activities of living matter since Precambrian time, to which the first manifestations of the activity of micro-organisms in the ancient ocean date back. This means that this notion embraces all geological eras and cannot refer only to their last stages. The notion of the noösphere has nothing to do with geochronology. It means only the new, contemporary stage of development of the biosphere. At this stage, the global cycle of the planet’s matter and the transformation of solar energy in the Earth’s envelopes become essentially dependent on the increasing sum of knowledge – the scientific and subsequent practical activities of mankind. Thus the noösphere should be understood not as something new, but as the present, current state of the terrestrial biosphere in the contemporary geological era, no matter whether it is called “psychozoic” according to Schuchert, or “anthropogenic” according to Pavlov.
vernadsky as historian
The history of natural science, and of science in general as the history of the human scientific mind, was the second great scientific interest of Vernadsky. The work done by him in the field of natural sciences seems to be sufficient for several scholars. But he also was one of the twentieth century’s most outstanding historians of science. Working at his specific problems of crystallography, mineralogy, and geology, he constantly went beyond the limits of the studied area to the vast spaces of the greater history of knowledge, and not accidentally but quite consciously:
More and more am I carried away by the idea of devoting myself seriously to the history of science. But it is hardly possible: I feel a lack of education and an insufficient power of mind for such a task. Such work will take up many years, as I shall have to prepare for it for a long time. (From a letter to his wife N. V. Vernadskaya, 1893).
But this was not mere intention. In 1902–1903 he delivered lectures on the history of natural science at Moscow University which later were published as a separate book based on the archive records. Here he reveals himself not only as a professional investigator of the history of specific areas of the natural sciences, but also as an outstanding theoretician in a field of historic knowledge that was still nascent.
The very first pages of Essays on Geochemistry show Vernadsky as an historian. His works in general are noted for the scrupulous search for and descriptions of the historic predecessors of his own or other ideas, which, unfortunately, is not characteristic of most scientists of the present-day generation (though it is always characteristic of real scientists).
I shall give one of his notes to Essays on Geochemistry as an example of his attention to the history of scientific thought and to particular scientists. This note is devoted to a Croatian scientist of the eighteenth century, R. J. Boscovich:
R. Boscovich – Jesuit and citizen of the Dubrovnik Republic. Not an Italian, as it is sometimes stated, and against which he had always protested…. He became a French citizen in 1773, and passed several years (1773–1782) in Paris as an academician and Director of “Ortique de la Marine.” Being a Jesuit, he had numerous friends and influential enemies (including d’Alembert). It is interesting to note the sharply opposite estimations of his scientific importance in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. For us he is one of the greatest scientists; but in 1841 an outstanding astronomer, F. Arago, considered him “a person to whom Lagrange and d’Alembert related with great contempt” and “a mediocre foreigner” (F. Arago, Oeuvres completes, ii, p. 139–140, 1854). The interest in Boscovich has begun to increase since the middle of the nineteenth century in connection with the rise of the new physics; but it had never flagged in the previous century either.
This small note reveals Vernadsky’s typical approach to historic material, the scrupulous manner of looking into the personality of a scientist, the conditions of his work and his scientific and social surroundings. Of course it was promoted by the fact that he read in fifteen modern languages – all the Slavonic, Roman and German languages. No doubt he knew the classical ones, too.
thinker
Vernadsky was well-read in the
