Talk:Paul Ehrenfest

The Russian calendric biographical site http://www.znanie-sila.ru/online/issue_2337.html has a rather different biography of Ehrenfest on it. Even allowing for the old fashioned Soviet habits of distortion, I think it has much that should be taken into account when editing the Wikipedia entry on Ehrenfest, so here is my hasty translation:

Begin translation------------- 70 years ago 25 Sept. 1933, Paul Ehrenfest, Foreign Correspondent of the USSR Academy of Sciences killed himself. He was a great theoretical physicist of Austrian-Jewish extraction, professor of the University of Leiden (Holland), creator of an international school of theoretical physics. From 1907 to 1912 he lived in St. Petersburg (where he was called "Paul Sigismundovich"), and played a significant role in the founding and development of theoretical physics of European calibre in Russia. The cause for his arrival in Russia was his mariage to Tatyana Alexeevna Afanasyeva, who was studying mathematics at Goettingen University. Ehrenfests's suicide was caused by his loss of faith in his own abilities and his painful conviction of his own exhaustion of his scholarly potential. In addition to this, his strength of spirit was being continually undercut by his awareness of his younger son's incurable mental illness. And here was the tragic finale: Ehrenfest went to a country guest house, where his unfortunate son was being kept, sat together with him in a boat, rowed out to the center of the lake, where he first shot his son and then shot himself.

It is interesting that in the investigations following the NKVD arrest of the theoretical physicist Lev Landau in 1938, Ehrenfest was passed off as a German spy enlisting Soviet physicists.

End translation---------

Now I don't expect that the Wikipedia article should take all of this at face value: but I do find it odd that it mentions his suicide, and not that it was a -murder-suicide. Nor does it mention the suspicious timing: suicide was NOT the normal cause of death in 1933 in Soviet Russia: the NKVD was. It is quite possible that even fear of the NKVD was a significant contributing factor to his suicide, esecially if they later accused him of being a spy.

I should also point out that then as now, being a member of the Academy of Sciences was reserved for scientists of the most outstanding calibre, even under Stalin and Khruschev. So it was a real honor to be named a Foreign Correspondent of the Academy.