Vitali Lasarewitsch Ginsburg

from Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Vitali Lasarewitsch Ginsburg

Vitaly Ginzburg ( Russian Виталий Лазаревич Гинзбург ; born September 21 . Jul / 4. October  1916 greg. In Moscow , †  8. November 2009 ) was a Russian physicist . In 2003 he received the Nobel Prize in Physics “for pioneering work in the theory of superconductors and superfluids” .

Life

origin

Vitali Ginsburg was born into a Jewish family during the days of tsarist Russia , the only child of the engineer Lasar Jefimowitsch Ginsburg (1863–1942) and the doctor Avgusta Weniaminowna Wildauer-Ginsburg (1886–1920). After the death of the mother, who died of typhus in 1920 , her younger sister Rosa took care of the family. Since father and aunt did not trust the quality of the new socialist school system, they did not send Vitali to school until 1927 at the age of eleven. Since the school reform of 1931 abolished all secondary schools, he left school after the seventh grade.

Career

However, he did not attend the subsequent vocational school - as intended by the system - but began as a laboratory assistant in an X-ray laboratory . When the admission requirements for higher education were relaxed in 1933, he applied for a place in physics at the University of Moscow. However, since he had finished school after the seventh grade, he still had to acquire the material from the previous upper school - he completed this workload within three months through a crash course , but failed the entrance exams. Since he had already given notice in the X-ray laboratory, he attended lectures as a guest auditor for a year before he was officially admitted. After graduating in 1938 , he received his doctorate in 1942 at the Lebedev Institute of the Academy of Sciences of the USSR , which at the time had been evacuated from Moscow to Kazan .

Because of his Jewish descent, Ginsburg was not appointed professor in Gorky in the increasingly anti-Semitic climate of 1947 , even though he had already given lectures since 1946. The reason that he was able to continue working scientifically and was not subject to further reprisals was his collaboration (together with Andrei Sakharov ) in the group around his mentor Igor Tamm on the Soviet hydrogen bomb . This was successfully tested in 1953. Only after Stalin's death in 1953 did fate change for Ginsburg, he was elected a member of the Academy of Sciences and his wife was able to return to Moscow from exile in Gorky . In 1971 Ginsburg succeeded Igor Tamm as head of the Lebedew Institute. He held this position until 1988. In 2003, together with Alexei Alexejewitsch Abrikossow and Anthony James Leggett , he was honored with the Nobel Prize in Physics for his fundamental work on superconductivity , the phenomenological Ginsburg-Landau theory .

Together with other members of the Academy of Sciences, he wrote a letter to President Putin in 2007 against the increasing clericalization of Russian society and protested against its influence on the sciences. He criticized attempts by the Russian Orthodox Church, in contravention of the country's constitution, which provides for a separation of church and state, to introduce the basics of Orthodox culture as a compulsory subject in all schools in Russia. The scientists pointed to the existence of many beliefs in Russia and the fact that the majority of the population are atheists. The letter says, "In fact, all the achievements of modern science on a world scale are based on materialistic worldview. There is nothing else in modern science."

Private life

Witali Ginsburg was married to Olga Samscha from 1937 to 1946, whom he met while studying. With her he has a daughter, Irina Dorman, born in 1939. In 1946 he married Nina Ivanovna Yermakova and was a target of the MGB (the Ministry of State Security ), although he had been a party member of the VKP (b) (later CPSU ) since 1942 . His wife's father died in an internment camp in 1942; his wife herself was interned in 1944 for planning an alleged assassination attempt on Stalin and was only released in 1945 under strict conditions. It was not rehabilitated until 1956 - three years after Stalin's death - as part of a general amnesty.

Awards

Fonts

  • On physics and astrophysics, Vieweg 1977
  • Key problems of physics and astrophysics, MIR 1976
  • Problems in undergraduate physics, 4 volumes, Pergamon Press 1965
  • with VM Agranovich: Crystal optics with spatial dispersion, and excitons, Springer 1984
  • About science, myself and others, IOP Publ. 2005
  • Applications of electrodynamics in theoretical physics and astrophysics, Gordon and Breach, 2nd edition 1989
  • Astrophysics of cosmic rays, Jerusalem 1969 (Israel Program for Scientific Translations)
  • Elementary processes for cosmic ray astrophysics, Gordon and Breach 1969
  • with SI Syrovatskii: The origin of cosmic rays, Gordon and Breach 1969
  • On superconductivity and superfluidity: a scientific autobiography, Springer 2009
  • The physics of a lifetime: reflections on the problems and personalities of 20th century physics, Springer 2001
  • The propagation of electromagnetic waves in plasmas, 2nd edition, Pergamon Press 1970
  • Theoretical physics and astrophysics, Pergamon Press 1979
  • with VN Tsytovich: Transition radiation and transition scattering, Adam Hilger 1990
  • Waynflete lectures on physics: selected topics in contemporary physics and astrophysics, Pergamon Press 1983
  • Editor: Thermodynamics and electrodynamics of superconductors, Nova Scientific Publ. 1988

Footnotes

  1. ↑ Irina Volkova: Open letter to Putin. In: New Germany. July 26, 2007, accessed December 23, 2017 .

Web links

Commons : Witali Ginsburg  - Collection of images, videos and audio files
personal data
SURNAME Ginsburg, Vitali Lasarewitsch
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Гинзбург, Виталий Лазаревич (Russian)
BRIEF DESCRIPTION Russian physicist and Nobel Prize winner
DATE OF BIRTH 4th October 1916
PLACE OF BIRTH Moscow
DATE OF DEATH November 8, 2009
Place of death Moscow