A surprising picture was observed by climbers in the Carpathian Mountains in 1989. Young men, climbing awkwardly over rocks, were carrying a large classroom board and notebooks. Ahead of them, a gray-haired, bearded man with a mandolin in one hand and a sheaf of books in the other was practically running up. This was exactly how the summer school for talented geophysicists and mathematicians looked like. The reason for its popularity lay in its organizer...
As early as in the 1960s, a controversy arose in the Soviet society between the so-called "physicists" and "lyricists", which boiled down to a search for the truth in the question: what gives more to man, science or art, and whether one can be neglected for the sake of the other? The reason for the discussion, which raged for the entire next decade and had echoes even in the 70s and 80s, was a letter to a newspaper. In it, a pedagogical student described an attempt to convince a young engineer that poetry is always relevant and cannot become obsolete in an age of technocracy. The topic elicited an incredible response. Bags of letters came to the editorial office, and the most prominent figures of science and arts gave out their maxims on the subject.
The man who was essentially the answer to this question was Sergey Goldin. He published poetry collections, made music, and staged plays. But above all, he was a successful scientist in the field of mathematical geophysics, direct and inverse problems of seismics.
| Most often, seismology is understood as a science that studies the nature of earthquakes and ways to protect against them. However, mankind has learned to use seismic waves for their own purposes - to study with their help the internal structure of the Earth and the elastic properties of its constituent layers. And in the process, to search for minerals. |
The theoretical methods of analysis and synthesis of digital filters and kinematic interpretation of seismograms developed by Goldin were the basis of algorithms for digital processing of seismic data. They have found wide application in most geophysical organizations of the USSR and Russia, which made it possible to significantly increase the accuracy of structural constructions for prospecting and exploration of oil and gas deposits. Goldin personally tested the effectiveness of his own theories. As a result, he discovered several oil fields in Western Siberia.
In addition, one of the most famous works of Sergey Vasilievich - a new concept of active geophysical and geodynamic monitoring of seismic zones, a fundamentally new interpretation of the physical processes that occur in the seismic focus during the preparation of the earthquake.
The importance of the scientist is evidenced by the fact that he was regularly invited to read geophysical courses at universities in different countries, such as Stanford University (USA), Technological University in Trondheim (Norway), Federal University of Bahia (Brazil), Tongji University (Shanghai, China) and the Petroleum University of China.
When Goldin, then head of the Laboratory of Mathematical Methods in Geophysics at the Institute of Geology and Geophysics in USSR, announced the next season of summer schools for young geophysicists, an incredible number of applications came in. Newly minted specialists involved in interpreting oil seismic data came to Western Ukraine, to the shores of Lake Baikal and the Omsk Sea, to Krasnoyarsk and to Tajikistan. In an informal atmosphere, they listened to lectures by Sergey Vasilyevich and then lively discussed examples from their own practice, engaged in scientific disputes, and agreed on joint research. As one of the participants in these seminars recalled, "these were not simply schools of the highest professional level, but creative studios in their very original and unique sense, schools in which there was a teacher and there were his students." In a sense, these seminars were the prototype of today's summer schools organized for students by the country's largest universities.
Sergey Vasilyevich himself graduated from the geophysical faculty of the Leningrad Mining Institute in 1958. He got into the profession by accident. The young Goldin dreamed of doing physics, even enrolled at LSU, but there he was quickly told that the road to the profession would be closed: his father in 1937 was declared an enemy of the people and repressed. This was enough to close off all paths to physics. That is when the young man went to the Mining Institute to major in geophysics, a specialty that he did not understand very well but was in tune with it. The scientist thanked fate many times later for this forced step.
"I quickly realized that this was the specialty I needed!" he recalled.
By the time he graduated from the institute, he received a personal invitation to work from SNIIGGIMS - Siberian Research Institute of Geology, Geophysics and Mineral Resources. The young specialist wanted to go into science, but at that time there was a law, according to which a graduate must first work three years in production before going to graduate school or research institute.
The geological maps of the 1950s, like those of today, were colored, but in the very center was a huge white spot: Western Siberia. All ambitious young people were sent there. For three years Goldin worked in field parties in different positions: as a technician, an operator engineer, an interpreter engineer, a technical supervisor and the head of the party in Kolpashevo, Surgut, Berezovo. In Novosibirsk Geophysical Trust, to which Kolpashevskaya Expedition and Surgut party belonged, Sergey Vasilievich was nicknamed Iron Chancellor for his tough temper and capacity for work. Although he initially perceived the production experience as yet another obstacle, he later claimed:
"It gave me a huge advantage over many of my fellow scientists. After all, I became a theorist, and a theorist who is completely detached from how the signal is measured, what can be done with it in principle, how it turns out... he does not feel, how tasks should be set. Certainly this has had a tremendous impact on my academic work, career, and character."
In 1961, Goldin finally enrolled in graduate school at the Institute of Geology and Geophysics of the Siberian Branch of the USSR Academy of Sciences and climbed the steps of the scientific hierarchy. According to the recollections of his colleagues, even then he was a fanatic, living in the world of differentials, integrals and quantitative dependence. While others were reading detective stories, Sergey Vasilievich was sitting over seismograms all day long.
This passion quickly brought results: in 1965, at the age of 29, he was invited to head the laboratory of mathematical processing of the West Siberian Research Geological Exploration Oil Institute and teach at the Tyumen Industrial Institute.
At the university, he initiated the creation of the specialization "Mathematical Methods in Geology", and in ZapSibNIGNI founded a scientific school of mathematical geology.
"A scientist to the bones, was engaged only in geophysics, he solved problems, which in the world were dealt with not more than ten people, a pure theorist in mathematical models represented the entire diversity of the universe. One of his inventions, which he was the first in the Union, at the Tyumen Industrial Institute: "geologist-mathematician". Hence all our programmers and successes in computer affairs... Sergei Vasilievich Goldin started everything," wrote Nikolai Kabaev, the discoverer of large oil fields in Middle Priobie and Lenin Prize laureate.
The emerging computing machines were cumbersome and slow, but Sergey Vasilievich appreciated the prospects of their computational capabilities and became fascinated by the automation of seismic data interpretation and the study of the analytical properties of seismic fields. He was one of the first in the country who started to teach digital processing and interpretation of seismic data on the computer at Novosibirsk University. The course of lectures he developed formed the basis of his widely known monograph, "Linear Transformations of Seismic Signals."
In 1970, the geophysicist returned from Tyumen to Novosibirsk to become a chief researcher at the Institute of Geology and Geophysics of USSR and to head its laboratory of mathematical methods of geophysics. During his work in the Siberian Branch of the USSR Academy of Sciences, the scientist established two more scientific schools: in the field of the mathematical theory of direct and inverse problems of seismics, including the study of nonlinear effects in seismic wave propagation in heterogeneous and fluid-saturated media, as well as in the study of physical processes in seismic sources and earthquake prediction.
In 1991, Goldin was elected a corresponding member of the USSR Academy of Sciences. With perestroika, his fame outside the country began to grow exponentially. Thus, his summer schools were replaced by the Russian-Norwegian Seminar on Petroleum Geophysics, led by Sergey Vasilievich in Russia and Scandinavia.
In 1993 Sergey Vasilyevich was invited by Petrobras, the largest Brazilian oil and gas company, to develop educational programs for master and PhD students in petroleum geophysics.
He became a member of the European Academy of Sciences and the American Geophysical Union and vice-president of the Asian Seismological Commission.
Goldin was also recognized in his home country. He was awarded the Otto Schmidt Prize for his contribution to the development of the theory of inverse kinematic problems of reflected and headwave seismics, and he received the State Prize of the Russian Federation for his scientific contribution to the development of oil and gas fields in Northern Siberia. In 1996, Sergey Goldin became the head of the Institute of Geophysics SB RAS. In accordance with the requirements of the time, he restructured and corrected the main scientific directions, updated the directorate, and determined a new image of the institute. He created and headed a new laboratory of physical problems of geophysics.
On his last three years the scientist worked as an advisor of the Russian Academy of Sciences. On the 18th of May, 2007, he suddenly died in Novosibirsk on the 72d year of life. As they say in such cases, he "burned up" within a few months. There remained a lot of unfinished articles and books, which his students published already after the death of their teacher: an outstanding researcher working at the junction of geophysics, geology and mathematics.
One of them is a collection of poems called Poems and Formulas. Maybe best of all Sergey Goldin expressed the balance between science and real life in his poem, called exactly the same:
Poems Are Not Formulas:
Solid Illogisms,
Where instead of syllogisms are aphorisms,
Which can never be proved.
Do the words play? Is the image juicy?
But the symbol knows the place, the symbol is accurate!
Doubt is on the edge of the curb,
And not to suffer, but to dare!