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Boris Mikhailovich Hessen (Russian: Бори́с Миха́йлович Ге́ссен), also Gessen (August 16, 1893, Elisavetgrad – December 20, 1936, Moscow), was a Soviet physicist, philosopher and historian of science. He is most famous for his paper on Newton's Principia which became foundational in historiography of science.
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Biography
Boris Hessen was born to a Jewish family in Elisavetgrad, Russia (now Kropyvnytskyi, Ukraine). He studied physics and natural sciences at the University of Edinburgh (1913—1914) together with his gymnasium school friend Igor Tamm. He then went to study at the St. Petersburg University (1914—1917). He joined the Red Army in the Russian Civil War, and became a communist and a member of the Revolutionary Military Council (1919—1921). He also continued his physics studies at various places eventually graduating from the Red Professor's Institute in Moscow in 1928. After working in the institute for two more years, he became a physics professor and the chair of the physics department at the Moscow State University in 1931. In 1933 he was elected a member of the Russian Academy of Sciences.
In 1931, Hessen delivered his famous paper "The Socio-Economic Roots of Newton's Principia" at the Second International Congress of the History of Science in London. This work became foundational in the history of science and led to modern studies of scientific revolutions and sociology of science.
From 1934 to 1936 Hessen was a deputy director of the Physics Institute in Moscow headed by S.I. Vavilov. On August 22, 1936 Hessen was arrested by the NKVD. He was secretly tried for terrorism by a military tribunal together with his gymnasium school teacher A. O. Apirin. They were found guilty on December 20, 1936 and were executed by shooting on the same day. On April 21, 1956 both Apirin and Hessen were rehabilitated (posthumously exonerated).