Ukraine

Ihor Yukhnovskyi (1925–2024): The Physicist Who Helped Shape an Independent Ukraine

Ihor Yukhnovskyi (1925–2024) was a Ukrainian theoretical physicist, academician, and public figure who helped establish a major school of statistical physics in Lviv. A participant in Ukraine's democratic movement and the formation of its independence, he also devoted much of his public work to preserving the memory of victims of Soviet political repression.

Lviv

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Chapter 1. A Childhood in a Changing Country

Ihor Rafailovych Yukhnovskyi was born on 1 September 1925 in the village of Kniahynyn, in the Rivne region of what is now Ukraine. His childhood unfolded during a period of profound political change. The territory experienced successive changes of power, and the lives of ordinary families were shaped by competing political systems and the upheavals of the Second World War.

In 1944, Yukhnovskyi entered military service as a sapper in the Soviet Army. He served during the final years of the Second World War, taking part in the fighting to expel Nazi forces from Lviv and continuing his service as far as Austria.

After demobilisation, he returned to Lviv. Rather than pursue a military career, he chose science. He enrolled at the Physics Faculty of Ivan Franko Lviv State University, where he developed the mathematical and scientific foundations that would guide his life’s work.

He graduated in 1951 and continued in academic research. The decision to build his future in physics would eventually make him one of the most influential Ukrainian theoretical physicists of the twentieth century.

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The City That Held Together

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Chapter 1. The Invisible Threads

At the edge of a wide blue valley stood a city unlike any other.

Its houses were built from pale stone, its bridges crossed a hundred narrow streams, and its towers caught the morning light. From a distance, the city looked perfectly still.

But it was not.

Every stone trembled almost imperceptibly. Every window reflected a different part of the sky. Beneath the streets, thousands of tiny springs carried water through hidden channels.

The people believed that the city was held together by its walls.

Only eleven-year-old Marta wondered whether something else connected everything.

She liked asking questions that adults found inconvenient.

"Why does the old bridge remain standing when so many stones are cracked?" she asked her grandfather.

"Because the stones support one another," he answered.

"But how do they know?"

Her grandfather smiled.

"Perhaps they don't know. Perhaps they simply belong to the same structure."

That evening, Marta discovered a small brass instrument in the attic. It had a glass dial, three silver needles, and a label written in faded ink:

"THE INSTRUMENT FOR MEASURING INVISIBLE CONNECTIONS"

When she turned its handle, the needles began to move.

A thin golden line appeared between the instrument and the city outside.

Then another.

And another.

Soon, Marta could see thousands of glowing threads connecting houses, trees, bridges, wells, and people.

The city was alive with relationships she had never noticed.

Chapter 2. The Professor of Many Things

The next morning, Marta took the instrument to Professor Oren, an elderly scientist who lived near the old observatory.

He examined it carefully.

"Where did you find this?"

"In my grandfather's attic."

The professor adjusted his spectacles.

"This is a remarkable device. It does not measure the objects themselves. It measures how they influence one another."

He placed a small metal ball on the table and set another beside it.

"Imagine that every object in the world is part of a much larger system. A tiny change in one place may affect something far away."

He showed Marta a box filled with hundreds of small wooden pieces.

"One piece alone cannot build much. But when many pieces interact, something extraordinary can emerge."

Together they assembled a model of the city.

They changed the position of one piece. The model shifted.

They removed several others. A tower leaned, a bridge sagged, and a little wooden house fell.

Marta understood.

"The city isn't just made of stones. It's made of the way the stones depend on one another."

"Exactly," said the professor.

He opened a large notebook.

"Scientists spend their lives trying to understand these relationships. Sometimes the most important discovery is not finding a new object, but understanding how familiar things work together."

Chapter 3. The Great Silence

One winter, a strange silence settled over the valley.

The streams stopped flowing. The bells in the towers no longer rang. The wind seemed to avoid the streets.

At first, the people blamed the cold.

Then the eastern bridge cracked.

A week later, the public well dried up. The lights in the observatory went dark, and the old clock began losing time.

The city council gathered in the central hall.

"We must repair the bridge," said one councillor.

"We must dig a deeper well," said another.

"We must replace the clock," insisted a third.

Everyone wanted to fix the problem they could see.

But Marta looked through the brass instrument.

The golden threads had grown thin. Some had disappeared entirely.

She followed them beneath the city and discovered that a network of underground channels had been blocked by fallen rocks. The channels connected the springs, wells, fountains, and water wheels.

The bridge, the clock, and the lights were not separate problems.

They were parts of the same system.

Marta ran to the council hall.

"You are repairing the symptoms," she said. "But we must understand what connects them."

The councillors looked at her uncertainly.

Professor Oren stepped forward.

"She is right. A system cannot be restored by treating every part as if it existed alone."
Chapter 4. The Work of Many Hands

The people of the city began to work together.

The builders cleared the underground passages. The gardeners mapped the hidden springs. The engineers repaired the water wheels. The children carried messages between the different teams.

The historians searched old plans to discover how the channels had originally been built.

At first, everyone worked separately.

The builders did not know what the engineers were doing. The gardeners could not understand the historians' maps. The children carried contradictory instructions.

Marta realised that cooperation required more than good intentions.

They needed a shared record.

She placed a huge map in the central hall. Every team marked its discoveries, measurements, mistakes, and unfinished tasks.

Nothing was erased simply because it was inconvenient.

If two teams disagreed, they compared their observations. If a measurement was uncertain, they marked it as uncertain. If someone found an error, the record was corrected.

Slowly, the city began to understand itself.

The underground channels were cleared. Water returned to the wells. The wheels began turning, the lights came back, and the eastern bridge was strengthened.

The old clock started ticking again.

But the greatest achievement was not the repaired machinery.

It was the map.

For the first time, everyone could see how their work formed part of something larger.

Chapter 5. The Shape of Tomorrow

Years passed.

Marta became an engineer, then a teacher, and eventually the keeper of the city's great map.

She added new discoveries to it. She recorded new bridges, new gardens, new workshops, and new connections between distant neighbourhoods.

One day, a young boy visited her.

"Is the city finished?" he asked.

Marta laughed.

"Cities are never finished. They are always changing."

"But how do we keep them from falling apart?"

She took him to the observatory and showed him the brass instrument.

"By paying attention to the connections. By understanding that a small action can affect many lives. By sharing knowledge instead of keeping it hidden."

The boy looked through the glass dial.

Thousands of golden threads shimmered across the valley.

Some were bright, others faint. A few were new, and some had been there for centuries.

"Which thread is the most important?" he asked.

Marta thought for a moment.

"That is the wrong question. A city does not survive because of one perfect thread. It survives because people care for the whole network."

Outside, the city glowed beneath the evening sky.

And somewhere beneath its streets, the springs continued to flow — connected, changing, and carrying life from one place to another.