Alexander N Dadaev

Alexander N. Dadaev
Born	1918
Died	14 January 2016
Residence	St Petersburg, Russia
Nationality	Russian
Known for	Historian of Pulkovo Observatory; biographer of N. A. Kozyrev
Scientific career
Fields	Astronomer
Institutions	Pulkovo Observatory, St Petersburg

Alexander Nikolaevich Dadaev (Александр Николаевич Дадаев, 1918 – 14 January 2016) was a Soviet and Russian astronomer at the Pulkovo Observatory, a veteran of the Second World War, and by the end of his life the observatory's longest-serving member of staff. He is chiefly remembered as the historian of Pulkovo and as the principal biographer of Nikolai Aleksandrovich Kozyrev, the astronomer who proposed that time is a physical agent capable of doing work.

His position in that story is unusual and worth stating carefully, because it is easily got wrong. From 1965 to 1979 Dadaev headed the laboratory in which Kozyrev worked. He devoted much of his later life to defending Kozyrev's memory, securing his standing, and writing the authoritative account of his life. He did not, however, accept causal mechanics. He judged the theory to be axiomatically flawed and its experimental support inadequate — and said so in the same essays in which he defended the man.

Career

Dadaev was a candidate of physical and mathematical sciences and a senior researcher at the Main Astronomical Observatory of the Russian Academy of Sciences at Pulkovo. He served in the war, and returned to the observatory afterwards.

His enduring work is documentary. He published a short account of the Pulkovo Observatory in 1958 and a full history, Пулковская обсерватория: очерк истории и научной деятельности (Pulkovo Observatory: an Outline of its History and Scientific Activity), with Nauka in 1972; it was later translated for the NASA technical translation series. He also wrote on the observatory's darker history, including an essay on its director B. P. Gerasimovich, one of the victims of the "Pulkovo Affair" purges of 1936–37.

Kozyrev and causal mechanics

Kozyrev

Nikolai Kozyrev (1908–1983) joined Pulkovo in 1931 and did well-regarded early work on stellar atmospheres and radiative equilibrium. He was arrested in November 1936 in the Pulkovo Affair, served ten years, received a second ten-year sentence in 1941, and was released in December 1946; Solzhenitsyn names him in The Gulag Archipelago. In 1958 he obtained a spectrogram of a bright patch in the lunar crater Alphonsus which he interpreted as evidence of volcanic outgassing — the result for which the International Academy of Astronautics gave him a gold medal in 1969, and which remains contested. A crater and the asteroid 2536 Kozyrev are named for him.

His causal mechanics holds that time is not a passive coordinate but a physical entity with properties: a directionality or "course" (ход времени) of finite magnitude with the dimensions of a velocity, and a "density". Time on this account can do work, transferring organisation between systems, and supplies the non-nuclear energy that sustains stars and planets. Kozyrev sought experimental signatures in the asymmetric weight changes of spinning gyroscopes subjected to irreversible processes, and in telescopic detection of the true rather than the light-delayed positions of stars.

The theory was rejected by mainstream Soviet science; a commission of the Academy of Sciences concluded in 1960 that it lacked a rigorous mathematical foundation and that the experimental evidence was insufficient. The gyroscope results have not been independently reproduced to mainstream standards.

Dadaev's assessment

Dadaev wrote the biographical essay that opens Kozyrev's Selected Works (Leningrad University Press, 1991), and the full biography that opens Время и звезды (Time and Stars), the 790-page centenary volume of 2008. The published abstract of the latter describes it as containing "the brief description and critique" of Kozyrev's work in astrophysics, planetology and causal mechanics, and the critique is substantive.

His central objection is dimensional. In Kozyrev's causal formula the "course of time" carries the dimensions of a velocity; in the physical arguments built on it, Dadaev observed, that quantity silently acquires the character and the dimensions of a force. He described this as an erroneous — or at best arbitrary and never verbally stated — postulate at the foundation of the theory.

His second objection is observational. The correlation Kozyrev claimed between terrestrial and lunar events, Dadaev argued, is accounted for by selection effects — weather, lunar phase, and the varying attention of observers — and the compilers' own warnings about doubtful or erroneous entries in the lunar-event catalogues had been disregarded.

He was also candid about the cost of Kozyrev's isolation, writing that his withdrawal from his colleagues left him unable to see his own work from outside or to take the point of criticism that was, in the main, well intentioned and useful.

None of this softened his defence of the man. Dadaev attacked those who repackaged Kozyrev as an occultist — the promoters of "Kozyrev mirrors" and bio-fields — arguing that to declare Kozyrev a pseudo-scientist was to hand his name over to precisely that desecration. He compared Kozyrev's trial in the camps to the trial of Galileo.

The paper on this wiki

Astrophysics and Causal Mechanics appeared in Galilean Electrodynamics 11, 4–7 (2000), at the front of what appears to be a Kozyrev-themed grouping in that volume. It gives an account of Kozyrev's life and work, sets out the time–energy ideas of causal mechanics including the claim that time rather than nuclear fusion is the energy source of the stars, and then examines critically the astronomical observations and laboratory experiments that have been offered as confirmations.

It is, in other words, a sympathetic but sceptical paper, published in a dissident venue — which is a fair description of Dadaev's position as a whole.

Selected publications

• Пулковская обсерватория — Moscow–Leningrad, USSR Academy of Sciences Press, 1958.
• Пулковская обсерватория: очерк истории и научной деятельности — Leningrad, Nauka, 1972.
• "Биография Козырева", in N. A. Kozyrev, Избранные труды — Leningrad University Press, 1991, pp. 5–48.
• "Astrophysics and Causal Mechanics", Galilean Electrodynamics 11, 4–7 (2000).
• "Николай Александрович Козырев. К 100-летию со дня рождения", in Время и звезды: к 100-летию Н. А. Козырева — St Petersburg, Nestor-Istoriya, 2008.

Papers on this wiki

• 2000 – Astrophysics and Causal Mechanics — Galilean Electrodynamics 11, 4–7.

Related work on this wiki

The Kozyrev literature catalogued here is substantial, and Dadaev's paper is the sceptical entry in it. See The Initial Principles of N. A. Kozyrev's Causal Mechanics, Kozyrev's Causal Mechanics in Stellar Systems: Predictions and Estimations, A Formal Definition of Causality and Kozyrev's Axioms, Experimental Verification of Kozyrev's Interaction of Natural Processes and Review of N. A. Kozyrev's Paper Dealing With Experiments With Time.

See also

• Nikolai A Kozyrev
• Galilean Electrodynamics
• Astronomer