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BIOGRAPHIES OF GREAT SCIENTISTS
Descartes Rene. Biography of a scientist
Directory / Biographies of great scientists
René Descartes was born on March 31, 1596 in the small town of La Gaie in Touraine. The Descartes family belonged to the humble bureaucratic nobility. His mother, having been relieved of her burden, died a few days later. Rene survived, but until the age of twenty, a short, dry cough and a pale complexion inspired fear for his life. Rene spent his childhood in Touraine, famous for its gardens, fertility and mild climate. Descartes finished school in 1612. He spent eight and a half years there. The school achieved an almost miraculous effect: in a young man of the highest degree of inquisitiveness, in a mind whose distinguishing feature, whose dominant passion was the passion for knowledge, she managed to arouse an aversion to knowledge and to science. Rene was in his seventeenth year when he returned to his people in Rennes. He gave up books and studies and spent all his time riding and swordsmanship. But it would be a mistake to think that his mind was asleep at that time. With this creative mind, all impressions were immediately processed into laws and generalizations: the result of his fencing amusements was the Treatise on Fencing. In the spring of 1613, Rene went to Paris: the young nobleman had to take care of acquiring a secular gloss and making connections in the capital necessary for worldly success. In Paris, Rene met the learned Franciscan monk Mersenne, the author of a very ambiguous commentary on the book of Genesis, while reading which pious people shook their heads, and the mathematician Midorzh. He got into the company of "golden youth", led a scattered life and became interested in a card game. Descartes' worldly friends, however, were gravely mistaken if they considered him one of them. After a year and a half of a scattered life, a turning point suddenly occurred in the young man. Secretly from his friends and Parisian relatives, he moved to a secluded house in the Faubourg Saint-Germain, locked himself here with his servants and immersed himself in the study of mathematics - mainly geometry and analysis of the ancients. Descartes spent about two years in this voluntary imprisonment. When he was in his twenty-first year, he decided to leave France and see the light. Descartes wanted to read "in the great book of the world, to see courts and armies, to get in touch with people of different morals and positions, to collect different experiences, to test oneself in meetings that fate will present, and everywhere to reflect on the objects encountered." The years of wandering began. In 1617, Descartes puts on the uniform of a volunteer in the Dutch army. And now he lives in Breda. He refuses his salary in order to be free from all duties, does not even go to parades, sits at home and does mathematics. Two years of reclusive life in the Faubourg Saint-Germain were not in vain. Descartes becomes one of the greatest mathematicians of the era. There is a note in Descartes' diary: "On November 10, 1619, I began to understand the foundations of the miraculous discovery." There is no doubt that the miraculous discovery of which Descartes speaks here was the discovery of the foundations of analytic geometry. The essence of analytic geometry is the application of algebra to geometry and vice versa - geometry to algebra. Any curve can be expressed by an equation between two variables, and vice versa - any equation with two variables can be expressed by a curve. This discovery was of great importance not only for mathematics, in whose history it constituted an epoch, but also for the natural sciences, and in general for an ever-expanding range of knowledge dealing with exact quantities - number, measure and weight. The inventor of the new method was clearly aware of all its enormous significance and generality. But soon Descartes, apparently, came to the conclusion that it was impossible to reform science with one idea, even if it was great and ingenious. The wanderings continued - together with the army, Descartes first visited Prague, then Hungary and Brussels. In 1623, Rene appears in Paris. Then new trips around Europe. In 1625, Descartes returned to France, but soon left it again and went to Holland. The resettlement to Holland was caused not only by the desire to get away from numerous Parisian acquaintances and love for solitude. There were other motives as well. Free institutions flourished in Holland, and the principle of religious tolerance was recognized in it. In Holland, Descartes liked the very structure of life of an active people, "more concerned about their own affairs than curious about strangers." At first, Descartes continues to work on the treatise "On the Deity" begun in Paris, but, despite the change in climate, his work is not going on. He abandons it and moves on to the natural sciences. A curious phenomenon observed in Rome in 1629 and consisting in the appearance of five false suns (parhelia) around the Sun - which Mersenne reported to Descartes - again revives his interest in optics and directs him to the study of the rainbow, since the scientist quite correctly searches for the cause parhelia in the phenomena of refraction and reflection of light. From optics, he moves on to astronomy and medicine - more precisely, to anatomy. The highest goal of philosophy is, in his opinion, in bringing benefits to mankind; in this respect he especially values medicine and chemistry and expects brilliant results from the application of the mathematical method to these sciences. Descartes does not study anatomy from atlases and books, but he dissects animals himself. In the middle of 1633, Descartes informed Mersenne that he had a treatise On the World ready and that he had put it aside for several months, in order to then finally revise and correct it. In the fall, Descartes began to revise and considered it necessary to first familiarize himself with Galileo's Dialogues on the Systems of the World. He turned to friends in Leiden and Amsterdam with a request to send him this book and, to his extreme amazement, received in response the news that in June of the same year the Dialogues were burned by the Inquisition, and their aged author, despite the intercession of influential people, was first sentenced to imprisonment in an inquisitorial prison, and then arrested in a village house where he was ordered to read penitential psalms once a week for three years. Descartes was seriously scared. The scientist decided even in the first minute to burn his manuscripts. This page from the life of Descartes will add nothing to his fame and is unlikely to increase the reader's respect for the French thinker. In 1634, Descartes drew up a sketch of his study On Man and the Formation of the Embryo. By a somewhat strange coincidence, Descartes, as Mageffi notes, had at that time the opportunity to make "observations" on a question that interested him. In 1635 his daughter Francine was born. Information about the life of this little creature is distinguished by extraordinary thoroughness on a point about which even the most detailed biographies in other cases are silent, and by extreme poverty in other respects. On a blank sheet of one of Descartes' books we find the entry: "Conceived October 15, 1634." But nothing is known about the mother of the child, the connection, in any case, was fleeting. There were hardly any romantic elements in Descartes' nature, and Mageffi makes, perhaps too harshly for Descartes, the assumption that the birth of Francine was the fruit of his curiosity. In any case, Descartes was passionately attached to his little daughter. Francine did not live long, and her death in 1640 from scarlet fever was a heavy blow to her father. In June 1637, Descartes published a book, highlighting harmless sections from The World: On Light (dioptric) and On Meteors, rewriting Geometry and prefixing them with the title Discourse on Method. It was, if not the beginning of a new era, then, in any case, a major event in the history of human thought. A new center appeared for the crystallization of already formed, but still scattered and unorganized elements of the new world outlook. The new world outlook took the form of one of its more or less stable forms; once again the path along which the development of human thought will proceed has been clarified. Geometry Descartes intentionally wrote intricately, "to deprive the envious of the opportunity to say that they had known all this for a long time." To do this, he released an analysis for the most difficult problems, leaving only the construction. Incomparably more popular were Dioptric and Meteora. Descartes himself was very pleased with his Experiments. He said that he did not think that he would ever have to release or change even three lines in them. In modern science, along with the inductive method, the deduction method is also widely used. Its essence lies in the fact that various particular consequences are derived from a small number of general principles. Although this method originated in ancient Greece, it was in this book that Descartes first substantiated it in detail in relation to natural science. Descartes did not deny induction either; he perfectly understood the great importance of experience as a means of cognition and a criterion of truth: “From now on, I will advance in the knowledge of nature faster or slower, depending on how much I will be able to make experiments. Experience gives me the necessary material for the initial premises, it also gives verification of the correctness of the conclusions drawn. It was not until 1644 that Descartes published a more extensive work entitled The Principles of Philosophy. It finally included Descartes' writings on the world (cosmos), which he intended to publish as early as 1633. In this work, he outlined a grandiose program for creating a theory of nature, guided by his methodological rule to take the simplest clear provisions as a basis. Even in the Discourse on the Method, Descartes analyzed all kinds of initial propositions, doubting the validity of any of them, including the proposition "I exist." However, in the act of thinking, doubt is impossible, because our doubt is already a thought. Hence the famous proposition of Descartes: "I think, therefore I am." To protect his teaching from the attacks of churchmen, Descartes speaks of the existence of God and the external world created by God. But the clergy cannot be deceived; they recognized the materialistic essence of Descartes' system. True to his method, Descartes looks for the most basic and simple in the material substratum and finds it in extension. Descartes' matter is pure extension, material space that fills the entire immeasurable length, width and depth of the Universe. The parts of matter are in continuous motion, interacting with each other upon contact. The interaction of material particles obeys the basic laws or rules. "The first rule is that each piece of matter individually always continues to remain in the same state until the meeting with other particles causes a change in this state." “The second rule that I propose is this: when one body collides with another, it can only give it as much motion as it loses itself at the same time, and take away from it only as much as it increases its own motion.” "As a third rule, I will add that although in the motion of a body its path is most often represented in the form of a curved line and that it is impossible to produce ... a single movement that was not in any way circular, nevertheless, each of the particles of the body separately tends to continue the body in a straight line. In these "rules" one usually sees the formulation of the law of inertia and the law of conservation of momentum. Unlike Galileo, Descartes is distracted from the action of gravity, which, by the way, he also reduces to the movement and interaction of particles, and mentions the direction of inertial motion along a straight line. However, his formulation is still different from Newton's, he speaks not of a state of uniform and rectilinear motion, but of a state in general, without explaining in detail the content of this term. From the entire content of the "Beginnings" it is clear that the state of the parts of matter is characterized by their size ("amount of matter"), shape, speed of movement and the ability to change this speed under the influence of external particles. One can identify this ability with inertia, and then in one of Descartes' letters we come across a very interesting statement: "It can be stated with certainty that a stone is unequally disposed to accept a new movement or to increase speed when it moves very quickly and when it moves very slowly ". In other words, Descartes states that the inertia of a body depends on its speed. In Descartes' letters, there is a formulation of the law of inertia, which already almost textually coincides with Newton's: "I believe that the nature of motion is such that if the body has set in motion, this is enough for it to continue at the same speed and in the direction of the same straight line until it is stopped or rejected by some other reason." This principle of conservation of speed in magnitude and direction is all the more interesting for Descartes because, according to him, there is no emptiness in the world and any movement is cyclic: one part of matter takes the place of another, this one takes the place of the previous one, etc. As a result, the entire Universe is permeated vortex motions of matter. Movement in the Universe is eternal, just like matter itself, and all phenomena in the world are reduced to the movements of particles of matter. At first, these movements were chaotic and random, as a result of these movements, the particles were crushed and sorted. In the physics of Descartes there is no place for forces, especially for forces acting at a distance through the void. All phenomena of the world are reduced to the motions and interactions of particles in contact. Such a physical view in the history of science has received the name Cartesian, from the Latin pronunciation of the name Descartes - Cartesius. The Cartesian view played a huge role in the evolution of physics and, although in a greatly modified form, has survived to our time. Creativity Descartes in this period is characterized by special features. Now he is the head of the school, and Descartes is especially concerned about the official recognition of his philosophy. He believes that it would be beneficial for the Jesuits to introduce his philosophy into teaching in their schools, and tries to convince them that there is nothing contrary to religion in it. In 1645, Descartes returned to anatomy and medicine, to which he promised in his Discourse on Method to devote his entire future life, and from which he was diverted by worries about gaining the sympathy of theologians. He settles in Egmond and works hard. In 1648 Descartes was summoned to Paris. This is his third trip to France during his stay in Holland. The first two, in 1644 and 1647, were connected with inheritance troubles. On his second visit, influential friends secured for Descartes a pension of three thousand livres from Cardinal Mazarin. In May 1648, Descartes received a second royal rescript with the appointment of a new pension and an invitation to appear in Paris, where he was expected to be appointed to some important position. However, on August 27, barricades appeared in the streets, and Descartes hurried back to Holland. Descartes was simple and dry. In communication, those who wanted to see him as an oracle, the personification of wisdom, were, according to Balier, disappointed by the simplicity of his answers. In a large society, Descartes is silent and unresourceful, as is often the case with people accustomed to a solitary lifestyle. But in the circle of close people, he became a lively and cheerful conversationalist. Descartes' attitude towards these close people produces, in general, a heavy impression. A rare happiness fell to Descartes: a circle of enthusiastic admirers and devoted friends gathered around him, but, apparently, he did not know such happiness as loving others. Haughty and arrogant with equals, bullying, like boys, the greatest scientists of his time, the scientist, approaching high-ranking persons, turned into a flattering and obsequious courtier. Descartes utters the following aphorism: "Persons of high birth do not need to reach a mature age in order to surpass other people in learning and virtue." Perhaps this attitude towards the crowned was the reason that Descartes, a rich and independent man who valued his health and was no longer young, went at the invitation of his admirer, the Swedish Queen Christina, to "the land of bears between rocks and ice," as he wrote himself. In October 1649, the scientist arrived in Stockholm. Soon after the arrival of Descartes, Christina began to tell him about the favors awaiting him. It was supposed to raise him to the rank of nobleman of the Kingdom of Sweden; in addition, the queen promised to give him a vast estate in Pomerania. At the same time, Christina forced the already elderly and sickly philosopher to break his entire habitual way of life. She found that philosophy should be approached with a fresh head, and the most suitable time for this was five in the morning. Descartes, who even his Jesuit educators were allowed to stay in bed until late in view of his poor health, was forced to go to the palace long before dawn in the harsh northern winter, and he had to pass through a long bridge open on all sides to the wind. The winter was unusually severe. On one of his trips, Descartes caught a cold and, upon returning from the palace, fell ill: he was diagnosed with pneumonia. On February 11, 1650, on the ninth day of his illness, Descartes died. Author: Samin D.K.
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