Physics by Phone

In a nondescript little whitewashed office at Tel Aviv University, the telephone suddenly rings. The 1,600-mile connection to Moscow has been made. At the other end of the line is Physics Professor Mark Azbel, 41, a former department head at Moscow's prestigious Landau Institute for Theoretical Physics. He is on a hunger strike because of the Soviets' refusal to let him emigrate, but over the telephone he now begins in fluent English a lecture for his Israeli students on "An Approach to Macrophysics and Condensed Matter Physics." A tape recorder takes it all down for the fall semester.

Azbel is one of six prominent Soviet scientists who lived on nothing but bottled mineral water for two weeks in mid-June. All had been fired from their official posts for trying to emigrate to Israel, and then barred from emigrating at all. Partly to keep up their spirits, the president of Tel Aviv University got Azbel and another physicist, Alexander Voronel, appointed to his own faculty; he persuaded neighboring Bar-Han University to hire a third, Moshe Gitter-man. "I hope that the administration will excuse my being unable to start my duties immediately, as I am, so to say, on leave," Voronel wistfully wrote to Tel Aviv. "I would be happy if some means were found for me to be useful to the university."

Thus the long-distance teaching began. At least once a week the three have been on the phone to Tel Aviv. The physicists come in loud and clear, with no interruptions from the KGB, which is presumably listening. For this reason, discussions are wholly on science with no politics mixed in. One disadvantage of the strange system, says Israeli Physicist Yosef Imry, is that students will not be able to ask questions of the scientists, "but our staff members will be able to field them." Imry says the scientists are "bursting with thoughts they want to communicate. Sometimes, when they get on the phone they talk for hours, literally, about some scientific point. No one has the heart to remind them that it's an expensive international call."

Physicist Yuval Ne'eman, president of Tel Aviv University, says that he and other Israeli scientists were instrumental in persuading the six to end their hunger strike last week. He describes the phone calls as enabling the Russian scientists to maintain their sense of value. "We want them to feel that life is still worth living and that they are doing important work. They are men who are at the top of their profession. For them not to remain active is like dying."

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