In his autobiographic essay, Efim Liberman contemplated the role of science in the world and his life. His generation lived through Stalin’s repressions and a world war, Khrushchev’s Thaw and perestroika, the nuclear weapon development, and advances in molecular genetics. Liberman characterized his life as a celebration of biophysics. Finding their faith in science at a surprisingly early age, he and his friends steadfastly kept it to the end. Efim Liberman was born into a Soviet Jewish family and completely detached from any tradition in general, and the Jewish tradition in particular. He trusted only the approach based on experiments. His studies made him a “multidisciplinarian” and coined his respect to the traditional wisdom, which he found compatible with unbiased scientific knowledge. Through his recognition of the “DNA code” as the text of a code written for a living cell, Liberman came to believing in existence of verities, which were not coded by people. He decided that a science, which unites biology, mathematics and physics, can lead to understanding these verities. He branded this science as Chaimatics after “Chaim” that is “life” in Hebrew. The cornerstone idea of Chaimatics is simple: calculation is a real physical process, and free energy and time must be spent in order to complete each computational operation. The action spent for calculations can change the state of the quantum objects that are the building blocks of the computer. For a living cell wherein calculation is conducted per genetic codes, the quantity of action spent for such a calculation is substantial. An analogy could be the situation in the Noosphere, where the expenditure of energy and time on computation markedly affects the state of the economy. A physical variable named “action” becomes a link between quantum mechanics and informatics. Plank’s constant, which is a fundamental physical constant, and, at the same time, the quantum of action, determines, in addition to the physical boundaries of the measurement operations, also the physical reality of any calculations. It turned out that “the action” is an essential characteristic of all living systems. Efim Liberman proposed foundational concepts for this new science wherein computers operating according to text codes, rather than mathematical formulae, represent natural laws. Living cells, which are biocomputers programmed in the genetic language, are the most ubiquitous computers in our world.
1
Strange as it may seem, my path to Chaimatics began at school when my friends Mika and Shurka were transferred to our class from the school where Stalin’s daughter was a student. That school was being cleansed of Jews. It was Mika who became my only teacher, and in 5th or 6th grade he decided that we should understand how the brain works, and for this, we must attend the Faculty of Physics. For this purpose, we graduated from high school externally [by passing exams without taking classes.] Otherwise, Mika and Shurka would have been immediately drafted.
Mikhail Bongard (1924–1971)—a pioneer of pattern recognition who authored seminal studies on colored vision, perception processes, adaptive behavior and mathematical modeling in biology, physiology, medicine and ethology, advancing frontiers of concept learning and collective machine behavior.
Alexander Fridenshtein (1924–1997)—a histologist, hematologist and immunologist who discovered and formulated the concept of multipotent mesenchymal stem cells in bone marrow and lymphoid organs.
But war broke out, and, at Mika's insistence, I entered the Faculty of Physics of Moscow University, in the process unenrolling from the Armored Vehicle Department of the Bauman Institute, where my parents had persuaded me to enroll while Mika was digging trenches. Then, we studied at the University, right in the heart of Moscow, but not for long.
I remember the Large Physics Lecture Hall, where later Yuri Lednev “kicked Einstein, a decrepit lion, unhesitantly in front of a qahal of professors”. I remember the first lecture on algebra that was given by Julius Rabinovich. He stunned me, but not Mika, when he started the lecture with “The determinant of the N-th order is...” But later we fell in love with him. He threw his thick, shabby briefcase under the blackboard and quickly wrote the entire lecture so that a chalk path grew on the floor in front of the blackboard.
From time to time, he walked along the chalk path towards the audience and said: “...It’s not enough to say this, it must be shown.”
A fellow student claimed that he once heard Rabinovich, who was making his way to the exit of a crowded streetcar, respond “...It’s not enough to say this, it must be shown” when a man he had shoved exclaimed “Where the hell are you, zhid, rushing to?”.
There was a war
On October 16, 1941, we were put on a bus and sent to dig trenches on the outskirts of Moscow. The buses did not move, though. We were dropped off, and Mika and I were left alone in the center of dirty Moscow.
The sky was black with ashes—the fleeing officials were burning their criminal documents.
The war was ours, we knew that the Germans were killing all Jews including women and children. We toured abandoned recruiting stations and Party district committees searching for weapons. But all we found were the bayonets from obsolete rifles. All machine guns and rifles had been disabled for cannon fodder training.
For some unknown reason, the Germans didn't take Moscow. Mika was evacuated along with the Tuberculosis Institute where his aunt Polina Bongard worked. Surprisingly, they went to Kirov, where all the tank factories had already been gathered and Mika's father Moses Polonsky was the chief dispatcher of the city power yard that supplied electricity to these factories.
Moses Ilyich, who had cooked kosher soap with his father in a Jewish village in Ukraine and protected the village with a machine gun from the gangs of Makhno and the 1st Cavalry Army, was arrested shortly after Mika's birth in Moscow as a former member of the Bund.
He said that when they were exiled to Central Asia, they, as political prisoners, refused to carry their belongings. The guards carried them. Those were still Leninist camps, and it was only after that people started believing everyone in the Stalinist camps was a criminal.
Mika's mother was arrested as the "wife of an enemy of the people".
I stayed on my own at the Faculty of Physics and, while putting out the incendiaries on its roof, saw bombs falling into the Kremlin and the square between the Manege and the University building. Then the roof of the Manege collapsed, but the wooden floors (which were later destroyed by fire) survived.
On November 30, the University was evacuated to Ashgabat. I brought my mother, Sima Israel, with me to the evacuation. My father, Azriel Liberman, stayed behind to defend Moscow. The train took several months to arrive in Ashgabat. Later, I found out that my future friend Joseph Shklovsky and my future acquaintance Andrey Sakharov had also been riding there in the neighboring car.
2
All I remember from Ashgabat are the lectures by Samson Gvozdover. We were mainly engaged in searching for food. Soon we found a suitable game: there were turtles crawling all over the Karakum desert, and we boiled and ate them, at first with disgust. They weren't the kind of turtles that gourmets eat. Before the May holidays, we went far into the desert with a bike to gather more turtles. But it was only by chance that we managed to crawl back alive. At the same time, Israel Gelfand's sister went to the nearest outskirts of Karakum with her beau. Although unlike us she was wearing a hat, she felt sick. The young man left her under a dune and ran to a nearby village for water, but on his way back he could not find her, and she died.
Our superiors decided to move Moscow University to Sverdlovsk. It turned out that Mika was already in his second year there at the Faculty of Physics, and we studied together for some time. Mika was drafted and sent, as I learned later, to the Sverdlovsk Infantry School.
We were fed only with nettle soup
Three months later I myself was taken to the Kamyshlov Infantry School. We were picked up at five o'clock in the morning and sent to the forest to haul logs for a few kilometers. The school was closing, and the administrators were stealing food rationed for us and building something for themselves.
We were fed only with nettle soup.
It was probably the worst hunger I experienced in my life. In a couple of months, we were transferred to the Sverdlovsk Infantry School. That's where I met up with Mika. Soon, I was sent with a lot of troops to the Orlov-Kursk Bulge.
Remarkably, before I entered the battle, not only had I learned nothing in those “schools,” but I had never even fired a gun once.
"Liberman — forward!"
The Orlov-Kursk massacre broke out before my eyes. Right before the massacre we met a KGB officer who gave me the nickname ‘Ivanov’. During a lull he came to me to find out why I didn’t snitch on others to him. I already had a machine gun, so he ran away immediately. My commander, an old village teacher, developed a brilliant tactic to keep his soldiers alive during the battle. He would rouse the soldiers by shouting “Liberman - forward!” and lead us to a distance of 50 meters from the German trenches, where German mortars could not reach us. Consequently, though, we were exposed to shelling from our own field mortars, but it wasn’t very accurate.
Before the end of the Kursk massacre, I went to a meeting with the chief regimental political officer. Another political lieutenant from our shabby company was so horrified by the battle that he had diarrhea, so I, as a former student, was sent instead. The Jewish colonel Semyon Kulish, who was the father figure of the regiment and always with the soldiers on the front line, so that everyone claimed he wasn’t Jewish after all, held a speech in front of his cowardly herd of political officers. At the end of his speech, he said, “There is a spy among us,” and read my letter to my mother in Moscow out loud.
After the meeting, I went up to Semyon Kulish and said:
— That was my letter.
— What are you writing?
— What should I write to a Jewish mother?
— Come on, – he said – I'll write that you fight like a hero.
— That's exactly what a mother shouldn't know. Put me on reconnaissance – I asked.
— Let me transfer you to the Chemical Defense Platoon.
— Don't you know how antisemitic the army is?
— I know,– he said.
So I stayed in the infantry.
The Orlov-Kursk massacre was over, and we were taken to the Nevel Pocket through Moscow.
Alone in a field hospital
In Moscow, Kulish gladly transferred me from a soldiers’ freight car into luxurious conditions: a separate detention car for an AWOL.
When we arrived in Novosokolniki, it turned out that the soldiers of the regimental 45 mm battery had caught typhus, so Semyon Kulish appointed me the commander of the fourth gun, from which I shot only once before being sent to the front line. There we were ordered to bring the guns into the combat outpost at night before the start of the battle. The first gun was to be moved, but the commander hid somewhere, and I went instead.
We didn’t get to the gun under my command, though. The order was called off. We had to take the guns back. The commander of the first gun hid again. I drove the gun back. Several people died on the way there and back. I was wounded before the battle and ended up alone in a luxurious field hospital.
On the day I was wounded, Mika was finally sent to the front as a private in the army. He drove into the Pocket as a machine gunner on a tank and returned on foot, wounded, among a few survivors.
I spent nine months in the hospital and did not get sent to the front line a second time, because Samson Gvozdover and my mother persuaded the general who was in command of the Air Force Academy to summon me from the hospital. I didn’t get sent to the academy, but I saw out the war in safety as a laboratory assistant for fuels and lubricants in the airfield maintenance battalion, and personally, even before my superiors, accepted the capitulation of the SS divisions of the Courland group. I went to the Baltic Sea and disarmed five generals.
Efim Liberman (right) with his comrade-in-arms in 1945.
3
Where will the cannon recoil?
So we got through the war, and returned to Moscow State University when Stalin and Beria were gathering physicists to make an atomic bomb. We understood that we should not make a bomb for those bandits and did not enroll in the ‘nuclear’ department. Soon the authorities began cleansing the Faculty of Physics of Jewish professors. Finally, it was Semyon Khaikin’s turn, whom we loved. In my lifetime, I read just one textbook, and it was his “Mechanics.”
Mika and I read it carefully, so when the professors were going to criticize Khaikin severely for Machism, we were able to intervene, saying that we had found mistakes in this textbook. The professors gladly permitted us to partake in the discussion and let us speak first. I talked about a problem involving rotation. A cannon shoots and a projectile flies out, but a weight is suspended on one side of the projectile. The projectile and the weight fly out of the cannon and rotate. The question is, in which direction will the cannon recoil? The answer in the textbook stated that it will recoil in the direction opposite to that of the projectile’s rotation. It took several hours for Khaikin, who had been expecting an anti-Semitic bashing, to agree that the problem was a difficult one, as all the moments had to be added up, and the masses of the cannon and projectile needed to be set. The bashing was ruined, but he was still kicked out. This rotation problem eventually helped me replace the principle of relativity with the principle of optimality, where the rotation moments do not add up.
thesis
I did my thesis with Samson Gvozdover in the Microwave Physics department. Samson Gvozdover, my benefactor and a very nice person, allowed his graduates to do whatever they wanted. My thesis was called "The Study of Relaxation Phenomena in Nuclear Paramagnetism by Using the Radio Spectroscopic Method."
I worked on my thesis under Sasha Magazanik, an engineer who, fortunately for me, had decided to get a second education. From a secret institution, Sasha brought a receiver that was better than those used by American innovators, but the radio wave generator was too powerful. As a result, following the signal of radio wave absorption by the spins of protons, whose magnetic moment is oriented mainly along the magnetic field lines, a signal of the opposite sign was recorded. I read the clear quantum theory of radiation by Albert Einstein.
Einstein explained that the probabilities of a transition from either lower or higher energy levels under the influence of electromagnetic radiation are the same, while the transition to the lower level occurs due to spontaneous emission (Einstein, 1965a, b.).
It became clear that our signal of the opposite sign was caused by the emission of the spins of protons that had been driven into a position opposite to the direction of a constant magnetic field by our generator, which was too powerful. A Nobel Prize for this discovery was awarded within seven years. Rotation and a comprehensible portion of quantum theory were again involved in solving that problem.
Excerpts from E. Liberman master’s thesis. The title page (at left) and page 40 where the effect being discussed is described (at right).
meeting with landau
I went to Academician Lev Landau to tell him about our experiments. Landau, who had been rescued from prison by Academician Petr Kapitsa, a great experimental physicist, was lying on a sofa in the apartment of Kapitsa’s Institute. I asked Landau whether our effect proved a negative temperature, which he had talked about in a lecture. At that time, Landau jumped from the couch, ran around the room, and then rightly noticed that the temperature in this system could not be determined. Since I learned about the Nobel Prize for negative temperatures from his book, he later changed his mind, but during our conversation, he correctly reacted to this “erroneous” idea. Otherwise, I would have been engaged in physics all my life.
But on the road to Chaimatics, this experiment was an appropriate step. The effect we discovered can be described by a comprehensible portion of quantum mechanics, although Richard Feynman had valid reasons to say that no one really understands quantum mechanics. Indeed, it is impossible to understand how a single electron examines the entire structure of a crystal. Chaimatics, unlike physics, does not try to answer the “how” question, but rather makes it clear why, at first glance, the world is so strange. Due to quantum and wave properties, stable atoms and molecules exist, and by writing the text of DNA programs, the Creator brought into existence living cells and living beings that can measure and calculate by using these very programs written in molecular letters.
4
“… and they will hammer their swords into plowshares and their spears into pruning hooks.”
I received my diploma from the Microwave Physics department and was sent to Design Office No. 1 (KB-1), which built air defense radars. I took up this job eagerly. Soon, trouble started brewing at KB-1. Academician Alexander Mintz (he was the same Mintz who had served in the 1st Cavalry Army, built the Comintern Radio Station, and whom a KGB lieutenant had infamously commanded: “Comrade Mintz, take off your order. Citizen Mintz, you are under arrest”) developed a magnetron twice as powerful as the magnetron of the 10-centimeter US radar developed at MIT and stolen for KB-1.
Stalin gave the order to build a radar based on this magnetron developed by Mintz. A waveguide with US-manufactured gas discharge tubes was the most problematic element. These tubes were unsuitable for such power, and kept exploding. A meeting was held, to which I was invited. Everyone was silent as nobody knew what to say. I said that we could make a waveguide and a switch to two antennas on time if we were given the necessary discharge tubes. All the bosses began scolding me: “This rascal does not realize that they will shoot us all in three months, and we can’t make the tubes by then.” But I had already figured out what to do.
The power was just doubled. Instead of the regular rectangular waveguide, it was possible to make a circular one, and position the discharge tubes at an angle of 45 degrees to the direction of the magnetron’s electric field. Rotation was used here again, but this time the electromagnetic field polarization plane was rotated. I was appointed to lead a team of 25 engineers, but as soon as our system worked, I was kicked out. Mintz told me that our radar did not work when the antennas were attached to it at a top-secret facility. My boss, a schemer and a future Academician who already commanded the entire system, said that Mintz’s magnetron was to blame.
Although Mintz did not have an appropriate level of access, he sneaked into the facility on a Sunday, saw the circular waveguide, fiddled with the antenna, and, having realized that "a wave is traveling," adjusted a phase shifter.
This locator of ours did terrible things. It was used to shoot down a US spy aircraft piloted by Powers, killing Sergei Safronov, a Soviet pilot, along the way. During the Cuban crisis, a lieutenant pressed a button and shot down an American plane without authorization from Nikita Khrushchev. You have to understand that developers are morally responsible for defensive weapons as well as for atomic bombs.
I hope that Chaimatics will help fulfill Isaiah's prophecy: “… and they will hammer their swords into plowshares and their spears into pruning hooks.”
Alexander Mintz also built the Serpukhov accelerator, which we later used when we attempted to conduct Chaimatic experiments on ourselves. Interestingly, there was another Academician named Mintz, a historian Isaac Mintz. After the arrest of Alexander Mintz, Isaac Mintz began to attend reunions of the 1st Cavalry in place of Alexander as an imposter. During the famous “doctors' plot,” he was instructed to collect the signatures of Jews in the Stalinist elite for a request for deportation to protect Jews against pogroms. He spoke about this in my presence to a Jewish functionary at the Academy of Sciences who spent time in Lubyanka in connection to this case.
We met again with Isaac Mintz at the hospital of the Academy of Sciences. While walking in the hospital park, he complained about how difficult it had been to collect all those signatures, and how one Jew had bandaged his hand and suggested signing with a cross instead. The Academician lied that everyone who had been asked to sign, had signed. Everyone but Neo Belenky, a member of Lysenko’s Academy of Agricultural Sciences,
who said:
— Immediately publish this document in the newspaper with my signature on it!
However, he refused to sign with others, saying:
— The party taught me, no collective letters!
In the end, he did not sign it, and, after Stalin’s death, even called Isaac Mintz on the phone and showered him with obscenities.
5
I would like to recall another meeting at the same hospital. Yuliy Khariton, the real creator of all Soviet atomic and hydrogen bombs, was hospitalized there under the protection of two guards. And every morning he gave me ping-pong lessons. Later I worked in the same laboratory as his wonderful daughter Tata, and was friends with her son Alyosha Semyonov, the grandson of two great Academicians. Then I learned that Yuliy supervised two theoretical departments. One was led by Andrei Sakharov, the other by Yakov Zeldovich. All three great Academicians were three-time Heroes of the USSR. Yuliy assembled the first atomic bombs himself, with his own hands. And although later Marshal Zhukov threw some of these bombs on Soviet soldiers, for some reason I do not condemn either Khariton or Zeldovich. Although, unlike most of my friends, I condemn Andrei Sakharov, who created this terrible final fruit of the old science. The test of his hydrogen bomb killed many people in the North, but he did not repent.
The incomparable Abram Fedorovich
From KB1 I was kicked out to the Institute of Cells and Electric Carbon Materials, which was developing galvanic batteries. For more than a year my friend Misha Smirnov had been working at this institute. He was not admitted to the graduate school at Moscow University, since he demanded that Jews also be given prizes at the Olympiads. Misha, together with a laboratory assistant, managed to reproduce during this time a thermal generator on a kerosene lamp to power tube radios. The technology was unusable. I went to Leningrad to see Academician Abram Ioffe. His semiconductor institute developed a thermal generator using a Becquerel thermocouple. The difference was that the electronic Constantan conductor was pressed into hole-type zinc antimonide, which carries a current with positive charges, at a temperature of 400 degrees for good electrical contact. A single thermogalvanic cell gave 50 millivolts. When they were welded to get 6 volts and polished for thermal contact, everything crumbled. The main problem was that the vibration transducer, which provides more than 100 volts to power the lamp anodes, was more expensive than the cost of the entire thermal generator.
Ioffe, the teacher of all Soviet physicists, received me at his villa on the shores of the Gulf of Finland. From the tower, he showed me a view of the waves, and we had a sumptuous dinner.
After that, I began to explain why the technology was no good. The incomparable Ioffe listened attentively, then patted me on the knee and said: "Youth is a terrible time, but it passes."
The atmosphere at the Ioffe Institute was wonderful, and I figured out how to change the design of the thermal generator so that it could be produced and sold. Now, instead of a hundred, it contained more than three thousand thermoelements, and they were pressed in asbestos honeycombs infused with heat-resistant varnish.
After I was kicked out again in the course of another anti-Semitic campaign, it was possible to establish production at a factory that produced kerosene lamps. I taught everyone, from the chief engineer to the female workers filling honeycombs made of asbestos paper. It was not yet known that asbestos is a carcinogen.
The thermal generator was produced and sold, including abroad, for only a few years, fortunately. We received an inventor's certificate and, after litigation, three hundred rubles for the three of us.
The Institute of Roentgenology and Radiology
After the tyrant's death, I was hired at the Institute of Roentgenology and Radiology as a dosimetrist, although there was a dosimetry department with two professors. The female medical professor decided to immediately treat patients with bladder cancer by injecting a solution of radioactive cobalt inside. The dosimetry department was going to take a year to count the doses from this radioactive material, even though they could be expressed in a simple formula. I participated in this harmful medicine. But one useful thing emerged: I measured how much radiation the patient receives from an X-ray of the stomach. It turned out to be 100 rad, while 600 rad is sure to lead to cancer. The bosses got worried. They told foreign colleagues about it, and those foreign colleagues made amplifiers for X-ray machines in their home countries. I went to the Institute of Biophysics of the Academy of Sciences of the USSR and became a teacher of the "Traceable Atoms in Biology" courses there.
The thermal electric generator based on a kerosene lamp feeds a radio set.
chaimatics
Chaimatics
Discovery of links between the biology, physics and mathematics, and founding a new area of studies focused on computations in living systems are his life achievements. Efim Liberman gave the name of “Chaimatics” to this new area of science
I
DNA is the text of a code written for molecular computers of living cells. The notion of “Text” is intrinsically opposite to a random sequence of symbols, and it can exist only inside the system of language. In this case, it is a genetic language, which is isomorphic to a natural language
II
Computations conducted in a living cell are real physical actions, and free energy and time must be spent for completing them. As all living organisms are comprised of cells, this statement is applicable to any control processes implemented in the biosphere
III
Molecular computations are limited by the microscopic scale of a cell and inevitable impact of the computations on formulation of a problem begin solved. The Chaimatics grew from the recognition of the computation reality as the quantum mechanics grew from the recognition of the measurement reality.
IV
A cell creates а quantum computing tool for solving complex problems. This tool utilizes hypersound quanta, and uses the cell cytoskeleton as the computing environment. In such a computer, a price of elementary computation converges to the physical limit, which is Planck’s constant
Chaimatic's statements are simple, but they require a change in the traditional vision, rooted in scientific practice
Read a book
Chapter I
The journey of life in science
chaimatics