Mikhail Lomonosov, in full Mikhail Vasilyevich Lomonosov, (born November 19 [November 8, Old Style], 1711, near Kholmogory, Russia—died April 15 [April 4], 1765, St. Petersburg), Russian poet, scientist, and grammarian who is often considered the first great Russian linguistics reformer. He also made substantial contributions to the natural sciences, reorganized the St. Petersburg Imperial Academy of Sciences, established in Moscow the university that today bears his name, and created the first coloured glass mosaics in Russia.
Lomonosov was the son of a poor fisherman. At the age of 10 he too took up that line of labor. When the few books he was capable of get hold of might now not fulfill his rising thirst for information, in December 1730, he left his native village, penniless and on foot, for Moscow. His ambition was to teach himself to hitch the realized males on whom the tsar Peter I the Great was calling to remodel Russia into a contemporary nation.
The clergy and the the Aristocracy, connected to their privileges and fearing the unfold of training and science, actively opposed the reforms of which Lomonosov was a lifelong champion. His bitter battle started as quickly as he arrived in Moscow. In order to be admitted to the Slavonic–Greek–Latin Academy, he needed to conceal his humble origin; the sons of nobles jeered at him, and he had scarcely sufficient cash for meals and garments. But his strong well being and distinctive intelligence enabled him in 5 years to assimilate the eight-year course of research; throughout this time he taught himself Greek and browse the philosophical works of antiquity.
Noticed eventually by his instructors, in January 1736 Lomonosov grew to become a scholar on the St. Petersburg Academy. Seven months later he left for Germany to review on the University of Marburg, the place he led the turbulent lifetime of the German scholar. His work didn't undergo, nonetheless, for inside three years he had surveyed the principle achievements of Western philosophy and science. His thoughts, free of all preconception, rebelled on the narrowness of the empiricism wherein the disciples of Isaac Newton had certain the pure sciences; in dissertations despatched to St. Petersburg, he attacked the issue of the construction of matter.
In 1739, in Freiberg, Lomonosov studied firsthand the applied sciences of mining, metallurgy, and glassmaking. Also pleasant with the poets of the time, he freely indulged the love of verse that had arisen throughout his childhood with the studying of Psalms. The “Ode,” devoted to the empress, and the Pismo o pravilakh rossiyskogo stikhotvorstva (“Letter Concerning the Rules of Russian Versification”) made a substantial impression at courtroom.
After breaking with one in every of his masters, the chemist Johann Henckel, and plenty of different mishaps, amongst which his marriage at Marburg should be included, Lomonosov returned in July 1741 to St. Petersburg. The Academy, which was directed by foreigners and incompetent nobles, gave the younger scholar no exact task, and the injustice aroused him. His violent mood and nice power generally led him to transcend the foundations of propriety, and in May 1743 he was positioned underneath arrest. Two odes despatched to the empress Elizabeth gained him his liberation in January 1744, in addition to a sure poetic status on the Academy.
While in jail he labored out the plan of labor that he had already developed in Marburg. The 276 zametok po fizike i korpuskulyarnoy filosofi (“276 Notes on Corpuscular Philosophy and Physics”) set forth the dominant concepts of his scientific work. Appointed a professor by the Academy in 1745, he translated Christian Wolff’s Institutiones philosophiae experimentalis (“Studies in Experimental Philosophy”) into Russian and wrote, in Latin, vital works on the Meditationes de Caloris et Frigoris Causa (1747; “Cause of Heat and Cold”), the Tentamen Theoriae de vi Aëris Elastica (1748; “Elastic Force of Air”), and the Theoria Electricitatis (1756; “Theory of Electricity”). His good friend, the celebrated Swiss mathematician Leonhard Euler, acknowledged the artistic originality of his articles, which had been, on Euler’s recommendation, printed by the Russian Academy within the Novye kommentari.
In 1748 the laboratory that Lomonosov had been requesting since 1745 was granted him; it then started a prodigious quantity of exercise. He passionately undertook many duties and, courageously dealing with ailing will and hostility, recorded in three years greater than 4,000 experiments in his Zhurnal laboratori, the outcomes of which enabled him to arrange a colored glass works and to make mosaics with these glasses. Slovo o polze khimi (1751; “Discourse on the Usefulness of Chemistry”), the Pismo ok I.I. Shuvalovu o polze stekla (1752; “Letter to I.I. Shuvalov Concerning the Usefulness of Glass”), and the “Ode” to Elizabeth celebrated his fruitful union of summary and utilized science. Anxious to coach college students, he wrote in 1752 an introduction to the bodily chemistry course that he was to arrange in his laboratory. The theories on the unity of pure phenomena and the construction of matter that he set forth within the dialogue on the Slovo o proiskhozhdeni sveta (1756; “Origin of Light and Colours”) and in his theoretical works on electrical energy in 1753 and 1756 additionally matured on this laboratory.
Encouraged by the success of his experiments in 1760, Lomonosov inserted within the Meditationes de Solido et Fluido (“Reflections on the Solidity and Fluidity of Bodies”) the “universal law of nature”—that's, the legislation of conservation of matter and power, which, with the corpuscular idea, constitutes the dominant thread in all his analysis.
To these achievements had been added the composition of Rossiyskaya grammatika and of Kratkoy rossiyskoy letopisets (“Short Russian Chronicle”), ordered by the empress, and all of the work of reorganizing training, to which Lomonosov accorded a lot significance.
From 1755 he adopted very intently the event of Moscow State University (now Moscow M.V. Lomonosov State University), for which he had drawn up the plans. Appointed a councillor by the Academy in 1757, he undertook reforms to make the college an mental centre intently linked with the lifetime of the nation. To that finish, he wrote a number of scholarly works together with Rassuzhdeniye o bolshoy tochnosti morskogo puti (1759; “Discussion of the Great Accuracy of the Maritime Route”); Rassuzhdeniye o proiskhozhdenii ledyanykh gor v severnykh moryakh (1760; “Discussion of the Formation of Icebergs in the Northern Seas”); Kratkoye opisaniye raznykh puteshestviy po severnym moryam… (1762–63; “A Short Account of the Various Voyages in the Northern Seas”); and O sloyakh zemnykh (1763; “Of the Terrestrial Strata”), which constituted an vital contribution each to science and to the event of commerce and the exploitation of mineral wealth.
Despite the honours that got here to him, he continued to steer a easy and industrious life, surrounded by his household and some associates. He left his home and the laboratory erected in his backyard solely to go to the Academy. His status was appreciable in Russia, and his scientific works and his function within the Academy had been recognized overseas. He was a member of the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences and of that of Bologna. His theories regarding warmth and the structure of matter had been opposed by the empiricist scientists of Germany, though they had been analyzed with curiosity in European scientific journals.
The persecutions he suffered, notably after the empress Elizabeth’s demise in 1762 (1761, Old Style) exhausted him bodily, and he died in 1765. The empress Catherine II the Great had the patriotic scholar buried with nice ceremony, however she confiscated all of the notes wherein had been outlined the good humanitarian concepts he had developed. Publications of his works had been purged of the fabric that constituted a menace to the system of serfdom, notably that involved with materialist and humanist concepts. Efforts had been made to view him as a courtroom poet and an upholder of monarchy and faith moderately than as an enemy of superstition and a champion of fashionable training. The authorities didn't achieve quenching the affect of his work, nonetheless. The publication of his Polnoye sobraniye sochineny (“Complete Works”) in 1950–83 by Soviet students has revealed the total contributions of Lomonosov, who has lengthy been misunderstood by historians of science.