The opening of the world

While this number turned out, the 155th anniversary of his birth and 77 years since the death of a very outstanding and very controversial person in the history of Russian thought, science and technology - Konstantin Eduardovich Tsiolkovsky. About how ambiguous this figure was, even the simple fact that our editorial office had happened - whether the Tsiolkovsky was considered to be a scientist?

He had no higher education, but an academician of the Socialist Academy of Public Sciences in 1918 was elected (by the way, he was called a member of the conveyor). Being a self -taught, Tsiolkovsky had his own opinion on all issues - from biology to airships. Somewhere to this day it is considered ahead of his time-for example, in rocket science, where they still use the formula of Tsiolkovsky and the launch vehicles are now all-stage. Somewhere Tsiolkovsky behaved as a sincere Sins-Frica: for example, what is worth his stubborn denial of Einstein's theory of relativity, the inability to exceed the speed of light, expand the universe-even in 1935, Konstantin Eduardovich celebrated all observant evidence.

And some of his ideas about the future today evoke a shudder, for example, about breeding the breed of geniuses - by selecting and mating of outstanding people.

But, it seems to me, his main merit to descendants and science is somewhat different.

This is what story the editor-in-chief of the TRV-hunger Boris Stern (astrophysicist, if anyone does not know) tells: “My grandfather Boris Vasilievich Leokhnovsky lived in Kaluga somewhere from 1910 to 1919, on the same street with Tsiolkovsky, and made friends with him. Tsiolkovsky often went to visit them with his grandmother. According to the stories of his grandmother, he looked groomed and always with a huge appetite ate Babushkin Borsch. Grandfather, apparently, was for Konstantin Eduardovich the most valuable listener - a graduate of Moscow State University, which at that time designated a deliberately highly educated person. And he, being a humanist, became infected with astronomy. Tsiolkovsky gave his grandfather his brochures with the inscription “My young friend ...”, they, unfortunately, disappeared during the Great Patriotic War. But his grandfather did not disappear interest in astronomy, as well as the popular books acquired by him later. I read them in childhood. Maybe that's why he eventually became an astrophysicist. These causal relationships are found in our close world. .. ".

A similar story happened to me: the dreams of space for me began with three books that my grandfather gave me to read. Two of them are dedicated to Tsiolkovsky himself - this is the “discovery of the world” by Boris Lyapunov, the “KEC stars” Alexander Belyaev, and the third is the story “Outside the Earth” - the Kaluga dreamer himself. I did not become an astrophysicist, unlike the editor -in -chief, but I still came to what I am writing about space. In my opinion, this is the main result of the life of K. E. Tsiolkovsky.

Alexey Paevsky