Reminiscences about D.V. Volkov
by
S.S. Sannikov-Proskuryakov
I was only a student working on graduation thesis under Dmitry
Vasilievich guidance. He was my first teacher in
physics. But our first acquaintance with Dmitry Vasilievich (he was preparing
to defend his Candidate thesis) took place in
Then I was in love with quantum mechanics and knew it quite well. I read everything connected with Bohr and Heisenberg. I was sure that there was some magic connection of names in physics (the identical one is found in music, namely Beethoven and Mozart). They both seemed to me inaccessible ideal. And suddenly an alive ideal appeared at the blackboard.
The first lecture by Dmitry Vasilievich was dedicated to Green functions of Schroedinger equation. In mathematical relation it was quite an advanced problem, not from the text-book, and Dmitry Vasilievich notable worried; his speech was jerky, the material was not connected, and the audience had to gain efforts to connect everything together. But it seemed to me, that it was the right way to lecture quantum mechanics, not taking care about logic, with missings, without academic approach strictness (there were enough formal lectures with academic approach).
I enjoyed the first and some other of his lectures. At that time I started to created God from Dmitry Vasilievich. It seemed to me that he looked like Heisenberg: he really looked like a portrait of Heisenberg, which I had only seen beforehand (though having seen the photo of Heisenberg I was disappointed as real Heisenberg did not look his portrait and I didn't like him). And probably there was a case, when I told Dmitry Vasilievich about his likeness with Heisenberg.
At that time (1956-57) my attitude with quantum mechanics was youth-like admirable (then I was ashamed with this feeling), but Dmitry Vasilievich was young too and also had this feeling. Then I couldn't understand how it was possible in the student's age to be carried away with plasma, hard body or nucleus. Quantum mechanics was good because it contained serious mathematics, and that was the reason why it carried me. Physics have not enough mathematical education to understand the real depth of this theory and to see the unique point of growth in it.
In that years I was acquainted not only with quantum mechanics (I read the books by Dirac, Pauli, Blokhintsev), but I also know elementary particles theory of Heisenberg. A bit earlier I had began to extract square root from spinor (on know-how level; the scientific result appeared only in 1964).
The time of the diploma paper came and I asked Dmintry Vasilievich to take me under his guidance to make a diploma. The theme was modern – new Heisenberg theory. It was necessary to quantize two-component linear spinor equation (Heisenberg quantized 4-component ones).
At that time Dmitry Vasilievich
defended his thesis, went to
Akhiezer also knew about the diploma paper. The difficulty of the theme appeared in the fact, that I could do nothing for a long time, I have nothing of a scientific result. But having studied the work by Heisenberg accurately I noticed that from quantizaton method leads another one, in which in the left instead of two field operators, as it usually was, there were three operators (which resembled Kummeron-Daffin algebra, which was used in D.V. Volkov's dissertation). I showed it to Dmitry Vasilievich. On the next day Dmitry Vasilievich told me about Fermi-fields quantatizaton method, which was later called parastatistics.
By autumn I managed to solve nonlinear classical equations. The result seemed to Dmitry Vasilievich beautiful, but the main thing was that Maxwell equations in quantized form led from this theory. I gave the written work to Dmitry Vasilievich.
A.I. (Akhiezer) liked it and suggested his help in writing an article. But the article was never written and there was no publication. On the first page of my diploma paper there was a note: Scientific leader Candidate of physico-mathematical sciences, assistant professor D.V. Volkov (but he crossed out the word 'assistant professor', and it seemed to me, that such words as assistant professor or professor were not respected by him; but he highly appreciated the research and scientific activity).
I don’t remember what formal estimation my work got in the day of defense.
But as soon as I finished my report A.I. pointed at me with his finger and
said: " It turns out, that he cannot report
his work" and then he added: "I will never allow you to carry out
the research on this theory here. They will laugh in
For the nearest future I had to correct mistakes in the book by A.I. Akhieizer. Like Dmitry Vasilievich I did not like to do anything under the lash and that is why I secretly continued to extract square root from spinor.
Many years later I had to communicate with Dmitry Vasilievich. The case was with infinitesimal representations of torsion groups with fractional spin which were followed from the operation of square root extraction from spinor.
June, 2004
Translated into English by Tatiana Kudryashova