Remembering Yakov Abramovich Smorodinsky
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IN MEMORY OF YAKOV ABRAMOVICH SMORODINSKY
Remembering Yakov Abramovich Smorodinsky* F. Calogero** Dipartimento di Fisica, Universita` di Roma “La Sapienza”, Italy; Istituto Nazionale di Fisica Nucleare, Sezione di Roma, Italy Received October 14, 2008
PACS numbers: 01.60.+q DOI: 10.1134/S1063778809050202
This is a very brief contribution reflecting my intervention at the Conference on Symmetries in Physics held from 27–29 March 2008 and dedicated to Yakov Abramovich Smorodinsky on the 90th anniversary of his birth. I met Yakov Abramovich, probably more than thirty years ago, in Dubna, where I came more than once in the context of my collaboration with Yuri Simonov and his wife Alla Badalyan, on the approach to nuclear physics based on the expansion of the many-nucleon wave function in hyperspherical harmonics. At the time contacts among scientists living in the Soviet Union and those of us living in the “capitalist world” were still quite complicated: my visits to the Soviet Union were certainly carefully monitored by the KGB, and had to respect many rules, most of which I was supposed to ignore as they were meant to constrain the behavior of my Russian colleagues. As a consequence, social contacts with my fellow physicists were, as a rule, difficult, although this did not prevent me—and my family, when we spent the academic year 1969–1970 in Moscow— to develop a strong and lasting bond of friendship with a few colleagues who were prepared to take some risks and ignore the rules which were indeed primarily meant just to prevent such friendships to flourish. Having become at least partly aware and accustomed to this situation, I was rather surprised and greatly heartened by the friendly and open disposition of Yakov Abramovich, when I met him for the first time in Dubna: he immediately invited me for dinner to his home, where I met his family and enjoyed a warm and most cordial hospitality. His conversation was moreover quite fascinating, due to the very broad range of his interests, in science and, even more so, in just about every field of intellectual endeavour; and ∗ **
The text was submitted by the author in English. E-mail: [email protected], [email protected]
the freedom from any ideological conformity which he displayed in these interactions was remarkable and unusual. I seem to remember that he was particularly interested in literature, especially the contemporary literature in the rest of the world which was difficult to access in the Soviet Union, where foreign writers were translated, and even published in their original language, but only if they passed some test of ideological acceptability to the Soviet regime. Indeed I remember that Yakov Abramovich did not hesitate to offer me a kind of bargain: I was to provide him with literary works (mainly new novels in English), and he would in exchange give me art books, of which there was a good, and relatively inexpensive, production in Russia, albeit to have access to it generally required having good relations with the official artistic
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