Vladimir Aleksandrovich Fock

Background

Fock, Vladimir Aleksandrovich was born on December 10, 1898 in St Petersburg.

Education

Petrograd University.

Career

Taught Physics at Leningrad University and worked at various research institutes of the Soviet Academy of Sciences.

Views

A distinguished physicist, elected to the Soviet Academy of Sciences in 1939, Fock became one of the country’s most authoritative interpreters of Marxist-Leninist philosophy as it applied to modem theories in physics. By effecting accommodations between dialectical materialism and those theories, he defended them against the ideological attacks of Soviet dogmatists. In the 1930s Fock was one of a number of Soviet physicists who accepted Niels Bohr's principle of complementarity in quantum mechanics. After the Second World War, however, these scientists came under attack by Marxist ideologues who charged that complementarity contravened basic postulates of dialectical materialism—namely, the objective reality and knowability of the material world and universal causal determinism. In the ensuing debate Fock elaborated weakened interpretations of those postulates that removed them from jeopardy and he also secured, in personal conversations with Bohr in 1957, assurances that Bohr himself acknowl edged the objective reality of micro-objects and their properties and rejected only Laplacian determinism, not causality in general. In Fock’s construction of quantum theory, the microworld is characterized by objective properties that he calls 'potentialities’—that is, capacities to be actualized in certain ways. Fock also played a major role in Soviet discussions of relativity theory, which faced comparable ideological pressure. He fully accepted the special theory of relativity, arguing that it is not only consistent with dialectical materialism but provides strong support for that philosophy’s doctrines of space and time as forms of the existence of matter, of the dialectical interconnectedness of all things, and of the inseparability of matter and motion. He did not believe, however, that Einstein was justified in proceeding to the general theory of relativity; Fock’s criticisms of that theory sparked controversy in the Soviet Union and abroad.

Interests

• Philosophy of physics. Dialectical materialism.