Vitaly Ginzburg.
Source: Courtesy of Valentina Berezovskaya, Moscow.
Vitaly Ginzburg’s grave and tombstone in the Novodevichy Cemetery.
Source: Photograph by and courtesy of Larissa Zasourskaya, Moscow.
Vitaly L. Ginzburg (1916–2009) was a member of the Mandelshtam-Tamm School, and also considered Lev Landau as his teacher. Ginzburg contributed to the development of the Soviet hydrogen bomb with an important suggestion, but never had full clearance to conduct classified work. He achieved outstanding results in many areas of theoretical physics, was recognized by an array of scientific awards and toward the end of his life, by the Nobel Prize for work he had done more than half a century earlier.
His life was characterized by a measure of constancy though he faced unending “temporary difficulties.” He was often obliged to keep quiet about events in Soviet society that he would have preferred protesting against, but he never made statements or signed documents contrary to his beliefs. He was a prolific researcher and author who wrote hundreds of papers and several books in which he described the science of his time. His writings made predictions for the future development of physics and astrophysics. He also wrote about great individuals of whom many were his personal friends.
I had a memorable meeting with Vitaly Ginzburg on a beautiful late-September day in 2004 in Moscow. We had corresponded about my visit, and I recorded a conversation with him. He was one of the previous year’s Nobel laureates. I had already met with Alexei Abrikosov, one of his co-laureates, in January of the same year, in Lemont, Illinois. On the day of my meeting with Ginzburg, September 21, we both attended the session of the Presidium of the Soviet Academy of Sciences in its magnificent old building. He was a member of the Presidium, and I was there as recipient of an honorary doctorate from the Russian Academy of Sciences. I was invited to sit at the head table with the president, vice presidents, and the secretary general of the Academy, facing the rest of the hall. At the end of the ceremony I was asked to say a few words. During my presentation, I scanned the audience trying to guess who Ginzburg might be. The ceremony was followed by the business part of the meeting, and the president indicated that I was free to leave; on similar occasions their foreign guests invariably elected to leave. I stayed because I was interested in seeing what was going on. Besides, I had nowhere to go and since following the meeting, Ginzburg and I had arranged to go to his office together at the Physical Institute of the Academy of Sciences (Fizicheskii Institut Akademii Nauk [FIAN]) named after the Russian physicist P. N. Lebedev.
The meeting of the Presidium was lively; the discussions were frank and sometimes charged with emotion. One of those who spoke was Ginzburg, so I now could identify him. His topic was the obligatory religious instruction in state schools. He was very much against what he called the clericalization of Russian society and found it especially upsetting to see religious instructions being introduced into the school curriculum. He was against it even if it was an “elective” subject.
When the meeting was over, an Academy car took us to FIAN, where Ginzburg had worked since 1940. We settled in his office, which was so cluttered with books and papers that it seemed smaller than it really was. From the first moment he made me feel comfortable, and the feeling must have been mutual because at the end of the recording when I asked him whether he would like to add anything, he said, “I enjoyed our conversation because I found that we speak a common language.”1
Vitaly Lazarevich Ginzburg was born on October 4, 1916, in Moscow. He had a strong feeling about his family, his Jewish roots, his science; and he had strong feelings about issues that concerned him. He was born late, when his father was fifty-three years old. His mother died of typhus when Vitaly was four years old. When I asked him to send me some pictures of himself, one of the few he sent me was his four-year-old self. He did not have brothers or sisters and did not have friends during his childhood either. He did not go to school until he was eleven years old—there was no obligatory school attendance at the time, and the elementary schools were not much trusted in the early Soviet period. It was not at all uncommon for families of the intelligentsia to keep their children at home and to organize their instruction privately. He did not have an easy childhood due to the upheaval in the world around him, in addition to having lost his mother. He revealed what he suffered from most when he said: “What I had in excess was loneliness.”2
Ginzburg’s paternal ancestors originated from the German town Günzburg on the Danube River in Bavaria, about fifteen miles to the east of Ulm. A Jewish community existed there as early as 1566.3 Ginzburg’s father, Lazar Ginzburg, was born in a small town in Belarus; he must have been very gifted and very determined to receive a higher education because at the time this was exceptional for Jews. He studied first in St. Petersburg, then in Riga, and graduated as an engineer. He specialized in water purification and held several patents. His office and laboratory were in the family home. Ginzburg’s mother, Augusta Vildauer-Ginzburg came from Latvia; she had studied medicine and was a practicing physician. When she died young, at age thirty-three, her unmarried sister Rosa Vildauer came to live with Lazar and Vitaly. She had prepared to become a dentist, but interrupted her studies and eventually, on account of her knowledge of foreign languages, worked in a company importing foreign-language literature to the Soviet Union. The rest of Ginzburg’s maternal family was murdered during the German occupation in World War II.4
When Ginzburg was fifteen years old, he left school. According to the practice then followed, he was expected to gain some work experience before applying to university. He was fortunate to find a job as a laboratory assistant in an X-ray laboratory engaged in structure analysis. This introduced him to research and to physicists who would later resurface in his career. It was at this time that Ginzburg chose physics for his studies, and a book by Orest Khvolson, Fizika nashikh dnei (Physics of Our Days), further sparked his interest in the subject. When he reached the age of seventeen, he applied to university after taking a private crash course to make up for the two years of school education he had missed. He succeeded in getting accepted, but always regretted not spending those two years in a school atmosphere rather than cramming the material into three months of intensive studies.
Ginzburg’s entrance examination at the Faculty of Physics of Moscow State University qualified him for a correspondence course rather than the regular one. He was not among the best applicants; but there were additional disadvantages. He did not have a proletarian background; neither was he at that time a Komsomol member (the organization of young communists; Ginzburg would join in 1937). Ginzburg stressed that anti-Semitism did not play a role in his difficulty in getting admitted to Moscow State University in 1933 (the situation would be much different after World War II).5 The next year, he transferred to the second course of the regular instruction, but here again, he missed subjects such as astronomy and chemistry that were part of the regular first-year curriculum but not of the correspondence version. Ginzburg especially regretted that he did not learn English properly. Later, he had no difficulty reading the scientific literature in English, but he had not acquired good English-language communications skills. According to others, however, his English was good; what Ginzburg missed was having rhetorical skills in English, something he possessed in Russian.6 Our communications were in Russian, including the conversation we recorded in September 2004.
His having skipped astronomy at the elementary level seems to have haunted Ginzburg in later years, because he did achieve important results in that field. However, his results were always in “sophisticated” astronomy concerning quasars, pulsars, and about the sky of radio waves, X-rays, and gamma rays. What he remained unfamiliar with was the ordinary stellar sky; he never learned the stars and their constellations. It did not bother him too much, and he never considered himself a professional astronomer; rather, he stressed his amateur status even though he was far above that. He concluded that “a lack of elementary knowledge in one or another field,” and he meant astronomy and physics, “is not yet an obstacle for obtaining interesting and important results in these fields.”7 What was more important, Ginzburg stressed, was the ability to distinguish between—as a popular Russian children’s poem said—“what is good and what is bad.” This quote is from his Nobel lecture in 2003 in Stockholm.8
Ginzburg immersed himself in his studies of physics but could not remain oblivious to the fights between two groups of physicists that increasingly reflected the political-ideological struggle then taking place in the Soviet Union. This struggle happened in 1935–1936, just prior to Stalin’s Terror, with the most tragic consequences. There was one group of professors who followed with active interest the development of modern physics—the theory of relativity and quantum mechanics. Their approach to physics invited the wrath of another group that considered these developments heresy to Marxism-Leninism. This is where the scientific debate received an ugly political coloring and could no longer stay within the framework of arguments and counterarguments. The main culprit for the “modernists,” or those who “bowed to Western influence”—depending on which of the two sides was looking at him—was none other than the dean of the Faculty of Physics, B. M. Gessen. He was both a physicist and a philosopher and had broad interests and knowledge. He was also an old Bolshevik, meaning that he had been a follower of Lenin back in the old days. This did not protect him; it might even have worked against him in Stalin’s struggle to consolidate power. Gessen was arrested in August 1936, tried, and sentenced to death in December of the same year; he was shot on the day of his sentencing.
Once Ginzburg became a regular student, his studies went well and he soon faced the question of specialization. His heart was attracted to theoretical research, but he had doubts about his abilities, and chose experimental optics instead. Gessen’s fate may have also served as a warning for young physicists to stay away from theory, which could be interpreted as ideology. The chairman of the department of optics was Grigory Landsberg, associate of the better-known Leonid Mandelshtam. Mandelshtam and Landsberg discovered what has become known as Raman spectroscopy, after the independent discoverer of the phenomenon. Mandelshtam and Landsberg observed that when light is shined onto molecules, the frequency of the scattered radiation is the combination of the frequencies of the light photons and the molecular vibrations. Hence, the Russian name of the Raman scattering: “combination scattering” and, accordingly, “spectroscopy of combination scattering.” An associate professor in this department, Saul Levi, was Ginzburg’s tutor; Ginzburg found him very helpful. Levi was a Jew from Lithuania, a refugee from Germany. During the 1937 Terror, he was dismissed from his job for being a refugee from Germany. Luckily, he and his wife managed to leave the Soviet Union and ended up in the United States.9
When in 1938, Ginzburg graduated with his master’s degree equivalent, Landsberg invited him to stay on for graduate work for his Candidate of Science degree (PhD equivalent). He was lucky because for a short while graduate students were exempt from conscription. Had the exemptions not been available then or during the war, Ginzburg would have not tried to avoid serving; but staying out of the army allowed him to go ahead with his studies. Thus, he continued his experimental work in optics. A photo showing the graduate student Ginzburg amid his complex-looking optical experimental setup appeared in a newspaper with a caption saying that graduate student Ginzburg pledged to defend his dissertation by a certain deadline signified by a jubilee of the University.
Ginzburg was, however, growing restive in the loneliness of the darkroom conditions necessary for his optical experiment. For some experiments he had to create conditions of “vacuum,” that is, very low pressure, in his apparatus. This takes a lot of time even if there is no leak in the apparatus. I know from my experience that creating these conditions often involves long hours of waiting. At the same time, Ginzburg had ideas for interpreting his observations, but he lacked the background in theory to develop them. At this point, he decided to consult with Igor Tamm, and this proved to be decisive for his career. Tamm was at this time the chairman of theoretical physics at Moscow State University. He welcomed Ginzburg and helped his young colleague to put together his first papers in theoretical physics. Ginzburg wanted to publish them in the prestigious Doklady Akademii Nauk (Proceedings of the Science Academy), for which he needed a member of the Academy to sponsor his manuscripts. Tamm was not yet an academician, but Ginzburg found Vladimir Fock, who was, and he provided the necessary assistance. This was how Ginzburg changed from an experimentalist to a theoretician.10
Ginzburg made an early theoretical contribution to the description of Vavilov-Cherenkov radiation (known in the West as “Cherenkov radiation”). This effect concerns the radiation emitted by a moving charge in various media. The experimental discovery was made by Pavel Cherenkov under the direction of his mentor, Sergei Vavilov. It was then interpreted theoretically by Igor Tamm and Ilya Frank (see chapter 1). The three, Cherenkov, Frank, and Tamm shared the Nobel Prize in 1958 (by then Vavilov had died, so there was no dilemma due to the three-person restriction of the Nobel Prize). Back in the late 1930s, following Tamm and Frank’s work, Ginzburg introduced some refinement to the theoretical interpretation of Cherenkov radiation, and provided its quantum mechanical description. His results did not add much to Tamm and Frank’s interpretation, but his approach was useful for the treatment of important similar phenomena. Lev Landau, who was the chief theoretician of another physics institute, the Institute of Physical Problems, did not place much value on the quantum description of Cherenkov radiation. He found it superfluous to spend effort merely improving something rather than producing something entirely novel. His approach was quite elitist, whereas Tamm’s and Ginzburg’s were more down-to-earth. The differences between the two leading theoreticians, Landau and Tamm, became apparent when the two groups occasionally held joint seminars.
Vitaly Ginzburg conducting an experiment in optics.
Source: Courtesy of Victoria Dorman, Princeton, New Jersey.
Ginzburg completed his dissertation very soon, and defended it in 1940. He then moved from the University to FIAN, where Tamm had in the meantime organized a theoretical department. The same people at the university who had caused the Gessen tragedy worked against Tamm as well, and eventually he had to give up his university involvement. At FIAN, Tamm became Ginzburg’s mentor during the next step in his scientific career, the Doctor of Science degree. It was quite unusual that it did not take Ginzberg more than two years to complete this degree, especially considering that just in the middle of this period the war started for the Soviet Union. Germany attacked the Soviet Union on June 22, 1941, and advanced quickly into Soviet territory, and soon FIAN, along with many other research institutes, was evacuated to Kazan. Ginzburg defended his D.Sc. dissertation in 1942, in Kazan.
Some considered Ginzburg an “impudent” student.11 This was a mistaken notion, although he understood why such impression of him could be formed. He was easily excited by interesting scientific problems and participated in debates with zest. At that time he had problems with public speaking; speaking in front of others was torture for him. Tamm encouraged him to develop his ability to communicate his thoughts to others, and it was helpful that he welcomed Ginzburg’s ideas. Eventually, Ginzburg developed into a good speaker.
Subsequently, Ginzburg often wondered how his career might have developed had not Tamm but Landau been his mentor. Landau as a rule did not show enthusiasm; on the contrary, he often cooled other people’s excitement. Ginzburg regretted, however, that he never took Landau’s famous multipart exam, the teorminimum. Ginzburg felt himself an outsider in theoretical physics—when he administered examinations, he sometimes had to ask questions that he did not know the answer to, for example, about the derivation of formulas. Yet he was successful, which he explained as follows: “Firstly, there is some hunch, an understanding of physics, tenacity, a grip on combinations and associations. Secondly, there was a great wish ‘to think up an effect,’ to do something. Why? I think that it came from an inferiority complex.”12 He felt good about having ambition; to him there was “a distinction between a ‘good’ ambition, on the one hand, and ambition, in general, and vanity, on the other hand.”13 He defined “good” ambition as “an aspiration to do my work, to do it well, and to have it acknowledged and acclaimed.”14 But he considered it important that he never wanted to be successful at someone else’s expense.
During his student years, Ginzburg was a distant observer of political developments. Then came the war, and he enthusiastically supported the defense of the Soviet fatherland, like everybody else. When the Russians refer to World War II as the Great Patriotic War, they express the sentiments of that time exactly. During the war, Stalin shrewdly invoked feelings of patriotism even among those people who opposed communism; he masterly played on nationalistic and religious dedication of the masses. After the war he did everything he could to crush those sentiments and added a vicious anti-Semitism to his pathological policies. However, during the war, patriotism and communism got blended in many people’s minds.
Under the wartime conditions, Ginzburg decided to join the Communist Party. This happened during the worst crisis, when the Germans reached the Volga, and taking this step in 1942 could not be considered a career move. He became a candidate for membership in the party in 1942 and a bona fide member in 1944. Indeed, his party membership did not alleviate the difficulties that came about at more than one level during the immediate postwar years. Ginzburg remained in the party until 1991, when he resigned from it. By then he had become rather active in forming and voicing political views that were not in line with the Communist Party. Between 1989 and 1991, he was an elected member of the Congress of People’s Deputies, just like Andrei Sakharov. They both were delegated by the membership of the Academy of Sciences.
Ginzburg married fellow physics student in 1937 Olga Zamsha; they had one daughter born in 1939, Irina. They divorced in 1946. Ginzburg maintained a good relationship with daughter Irina, who married and had two daughters. At the time of Ginzburg’s death, he had one great-grandson and one great-granddaughter—the children of one of Irina’s daughters—living in Princeton, New Jersey.
Ginzburg returned from the evacuation to Moscow with the rest of FIAN and continued at FIAN for the rest of his life. He had an additional affiliation at the University of Gorky. This town has since regained its original name Nizhnii Novgorod; it is east of Moscow, between Moscow and Kazan. The University of Gorky organized a new department of radiophysics, and because during the war Ginzburg conducted research on the propagation of radio waves in the ionosphere, he was invited to be professor and chair.
He started commuting between Moscow and Gorky toward the end of 1945 and soon he met in Gorky his future second wife, Nina Ermakova, who was originally from Moscow but now lived in a nearby village. She lived in exile, ostensibly for her participation in a conspiracy to kill Stalin. The supposed plan was to shoot the Soviet leader from her apartment window. Later, it was shown that her apartment did not even have a window facing the road where Stalin used to ride; but this did not matter. Ginzburg and Ermakova married in the summer of 1946, and she became Nina Ginzburg. When Ginzburg died in 2009, they had been happily married for sixty-three years. Between 1946 and 1953 they applied annually for permission to let Nina return to Moscow, but to no avail. Only after Stalin’s death they could finally live together in Moscow. From 1954, in March every year, Ginzburg and his wife made it a point to remember the death of the dictator with gratitude. His wife’s exile prevented Ginzburg from getting the highest security clearance, and this is why he was not invited to join the secret location for the development of nuclear weapons. In hindsight, Ginzburg considered this his lucky break. Yet, even his partial involvement with the weapons program may have saved his life.
During Stalin’s last years, in the period between 1946 and 1953, there were two developments in the Soviet Union that proved life threatening for Ginzburg. One was the emergence of state-sponsored anti-Semitism, and the other was the ideological struggle against modern science. The two developments were not entirely independent of each other. Often, when referring to Jews, the euphemism “cosmopolitans” was used, meaning people who worshipped the West. It was easy to accuse even non-Jewish scientists of cosmopolitanism because of their practice of making references to other people’s work in their publications. The two accusations found confluence in Ginzburg in the widely distributed Literaturnaya Gazeta (Literary Newspaper), which published an article titled “Against Servility.” In it, Ginzburg and a number of respected biologists were attacked for their ostensible opposition to the teachings of the powerful charlatan Trofim Lysenko. Lysenko was responsible for overseeing the Soviet agricultural scientific programs intended to increase crop yields. However, his unyielding belief that acquired characteristics were inherited resulted in overwhelming crop failures and mass famines.
In the same article, Ginzburg was also criticized for insufficiently referring to the works by the Soviet theoretical physicist, Dmitrii Ivanenko. The article was signed by an academician of the agricultural academy, V. S. Nemchinov, who could have hardly been versed about the importance of Ivanenko’s research for Ginzburg’s papers. Later, Ginzburg found out that the article was written by a person of much lesser stature, but to give it more weight they made the better-known scientist sign it. It was quite natural to suppose that the part of the attack concerned with physics had been inspired by Ivanenko, who denied these charges. Yet Ivanenko, a professor at Moscow State University, was an active participant in the ideological struggles in which not only Ginzburg, but others, notably Igor Tamm, were also accused without foundation. Upon the attack on Ginzburg in Literaturnaya Gazeta, eleven academicians wrote a letter to the magazine in Ginzburg’s defense, but the letter was not published. Ivanenko’s influence was substantial. It was also at this time that Ginzburg was denied the title of professor, supposedly again at Ivanenko’s initiative.15 This article might have doomed Ginzburg, except for his involvement in the nuclear weapons project, which I discuss more later. It protected him from severe consequences that might have included arrest and a harsh sentence. He would have certainly figured heavily in the attack that was already being prepared against physics and physicists accusing them of bourgeois idealism. It had been carefully orchestrated to happen in March 1949. It was finally halted given that there was an unambiguous conflict between ideology and the atomic bomb. The Soviet leadership, and in particular Lavrentii Beria, chose the bombs over ideological purity.
During his Gorky professorship and his wife’s continuing exile, Ginzburg had to spend a lot of time traveling. To overcome boredom, he developed a special pastime, which he called “brainstorming.” Its purpose was to come up with some idea and to do so within a limited amount of time, say, half an hour. For example, once in 1964, he was on a long train ride from Kislovodsk in the northern Caucasian Mountains to Moscow. He was alone, no partners and no books, and he decided to brainstorm. In choosing the topic he considered his longtime involvement in low-temperature physics and in astrophysics. He decided that this brainstorming would be about the question whether these two areas might be connected. In other words, he started brainstorming about the possibilities for superconductivity and superfluidity in space, and came to interesting conclusions. Within the set time period he concluded that superfluidity was possible in neutron stars and that superconductivity was possible in the atmosphere of white dwarfs. Upon returning to Moscow, he engaged the cooperation of one associate each to research these two conclusions, and they published interesting findings shortly after.16
Vitaly Ginzburg with his second wife.
Source: Courtesy of Victoria Dorman, Princeton, New Jersey.
This brainstorming was a remarkable exercise; one has the impression of being present in the process of the mind of a genius at work. Genius is loosely defined as the ability to relate things that others find unrelated. But once Ginzburg suggested looking into the possibility of the relationship between superconductivity and superfluidity under the extreme conditions of space, even for an outsider this consideration seemed logical. Superconductivity and superfluidity had been discovered under extreme conditions that had to be created in the physical experiments. In space, these extreme conditions are already present, so the supposition that these extreme properties may also be there is no longer surprising. Ginzburg noted: “To formulate a question is frequently equivalent to doing half the work.”17 This resembles the statement attributed to Leo Szilard about the most important part of a project being the recognition of the problem.
For a critical period, starting in 1947–1948, Ginzburg was involved in the Soviet hydrogen bomb project. The work had already been going on for some time when in 1947 Igor Tamm was invited to join. Tamm had not been considered entirely reliable due to his Menshevik background (see chapter 1) although by this time he had long since stopped any involvement in politics. Tamm formed a special group at FIAN which included Ginzburg, Sakharov, and a few other young theoretical physicists. As noted earlier, Ginzburg had some problems obtaining security clearance because of his wife’s exile, but for the time being, the security organs tolerated his participation. There were limits, though, to this tolerance; Ginzburg’s closest friend, the also-outstanding theoretical physicist E. L. Feinberg, was not given clearance because his wife had once lived in the United States.
The idea of developing the hydrogen bomb had been around, but it was not yet clear whether it would be possible to achieve that goal. This was also the dilemma in the American program. Once the decision by President Truman to develop the hydrogen bomb was made, it was a sobering recognition that nobody knew yet whether it was possible. Looking back, it was this uncertainty that necessitated the involvement of additional people in the Soviet project and led the security organs to relax the secrecy requirements, at least for the time being.
The inclusion of Tamm’s group turned out to be most fortunate for the Soviet hydrogen bomb program. There were to be three fundamental ideas for the solution, and Tamm’s associates proved to be instrumental in bringing about all three. The euphemistic description the “first, second, and third ideas” originated with Sakharov at a time when their physical essence could not yet be communicated, but these labels remained in usage even afterward. The first idea, by Sakharov, was the layer structure, sloika, and the third idea was the radiation implosion. The third idea was also by Sakharov, although Yakov Zeldovich and others participated substantially in the development of this approach. The second idea came from Ginzburg, and it concerned the thermonuclear fuel. Ginzburg suggested to use lithium(6) deuteride, 6LiD, for obtaining tritium, 3H, in the reaction,
6Li + n → 3H + 4He + 4.6MeV
where 6Li is a light lithium isotope, n is neutron, and 3H is the heaviest hydrogen isotope, tritium, often labeled as T.
The third idea came later, but the first two ideas proved sufficient to build the first deliverable hydrogen bomb, and the work intensified. In 1950, Tamm, Sakharov, and some others were directed to move to the secret location of the Soviet nuclear weapons laboratory, Arzamas-16. For this, a yet higher security clearance was needed that Ginzburg did not have, so he stayed in Moscow, where his involvement continued for some time.
In 1950, Ginzburg was made head of a small support group at FIAN participating in the work on the hydrogen bomb to augment the work at Arzamas-16. Even in Moscow the project was classified enough to have a guard sitting before the door to the room where Ginzburg and the others labored. Then, in 1951, as the project was moving ahead with the promise of success, Ginzburg was dismissed even from his limited assignment. It came about so abruptly that he was even barred from access to his own papers. On the other hand, somehow, by inertia, he was left alone and not bothered during the anti-Semitic state actions culminating just before Stalin’s death. If Stalin had lived longer, mass repercussions against Jews would have taken place. The best Ginzburg might have hoped for would be to end up in a sharashka, a special kind of labor camp where skilled prisoners conducted scientific and technological research.
On August 12, 1953, there was a big success with the test of the Soviet hydrogen bomb in which Ginzburg’s second idea figured heavily. As was described in previous chapters, it was not yet a bona fide hydrogen bomb, but the test was a triumph at a critical time for the project—immediately following Stalin’s death and Beria’s disappearance from the Soviet leadership. Ginzburg was no longer involved directly in the project and did not receive the highest award, Hero of Socialist Labor, and the perks that went with it. But he was still distinguished with sufficient recognition, the Order of Lenin and the Stalin Prize, which made his life easier. Even more significant, he was soon elected corresponding member of the Soviet Academy of Sciences. His contribution to the nuclear weapons program was a decisive factor in his promotion.
In my conversation with Ginzburg, he posed the question about the general morality of scientists working on weapons. He was especially concerned with his own participation in the work on the Soviet hydrogen bomb. According to Ginzburg, scientists generally speaking do have responsibility for their participation in creating weapons of mass destruction. However, a lot depends on the specific situation, and this is why he liked to insert the qualifier “generally speaking” when describing this responsibility.18 For instance, he fully approved of Albert Einstein’s involvement in the initiation of the work on the atomic bomb in the United States. Einstein’s action was justified by the danger of the possibility that Nazi Germany might also have developed the atomic bomb, and might have developed it first. Ginzburg was disturbed by Werner Heisenberg’s claims of moral superiority over Einstein.19 Ginzburg thought that Heisenberg would have served his interests better by staying quiet about this topic, because he was a leader of the German Uranium Project. The Germans did not succeed in their project. They committed several rudimentary errors, and to Ginzburg it seemed highly doubtful when they explained them by active or passive resistance to creating an atomic bomb.20
According to Ginzburg, those Soviet physicists, whom he knew, including Sakharov and Tamm, justified their participation in the nuclear project by the necessity of counterweighing the American monopoly. He accepted the notion that having more than one power in possession of the hydrogen bomb had a stabilizing effect and served as a deterrent. This was the policy of mutually assured destruction (MAD). Ginzburg never tried to mask his own role and responsibility in creating the Soviet hydrogen bomb, which was, however, more limited than Tamm’s and much more limited than Sakharov’s. It is also true though that at the time of his participation, and for some time afterward, it never occurred to him that the Soviet Union might use such a weapon as a means of aggression. He and his colleagues did not have any doubts at the time that it was their duty to work on the project. This was very different from the sentiments of the American physicists participating in the nuclear program. Suffice it to mention the fierce debates in 1949–1950 and that the majority of leading physicists opposed the development of the hydrogen bomb in the United States.
During our conversation in September 2004, Ginzburg admitted that he and his colleagues did not understand Stalin’s real aspirations; hardly anybody did. There was, however, one physicist working on the bomb who understood Stalin’s aims, and this physicist was participating in the project out of fear. He kept silent about his fears at that time, and Ginzburg did not want to pass judgment on him, but he would not identify him either. We now know that Lev Landau was this physicist; he considered himself to be a “learned slave” and quit working on the nuclear project right after Stalin’s death. Looking back, Ginzburg had no doubt that Stalin was a ruthless bandit. He would have employed even the most terrible weapons without hesitation if he thought he needed them to accomplish his goals and could get away with it. Ginzburg added, “It is the luck of humankind that Stalin and Hitler did not possess atomic bombs first.”21
Of course, it was just as well that under Stalin the physicists did not initiate a discussion of whether or not it was morally justifiable to develop the hydrogen bomb. The restrictions on the freedom of scientists went much beyond their inability to question the propriety of Stalin’s decision about weapons development. The scientists were not allowed to maintain contact with Western colleagues, even on purely scientific issues. Their ability to publish in international journals was severely curtailed. The foreign-language scientific publications of the Soviet Academy of Sciences ceased to exist after the war. Much of the excellent production of Soviet scientists remained in oblivion for quite some time before Western publishing companies started publishing complete translations of Soviet scientific journals, including Ginzburg’s works. Ginzburg’s best known paper, co-authored with Landau, was published in 1950, and it served as the basis of his 2003 Nobel Prize. Fortunately, Petr Kapitza’s former doctoral student, David Shoenberg in Cambridge (see chapter 4), subscribed to some of the Russian-language journals and even translated some papers. The Ginzburg-Landau paper was among them. Thus Shoenberg was instrumental in disseminating Ginzburg’s results as well as those of other Soviet physicists among their Western colleagues.
It was obvious that Ginzburg was troubled about the responsibility of the scientist participating in the creation of weapons. In our conversation, he returned to this question repeatedly and stressed that this responsibility depended on the goals for which such weapons were being developed. He was ready and willing to sanction the creation of weapons serving the protection of one’s country from aggressors and terrorists. He was unambiguous that he specifically meant Israel in this context.22
Ginzburg did not aspire for awards and position, and in this respect the totalitarian regime did not have much leverage over him. There was one aspect, though, they could hurt him, and they did. It was always very difficult for him to get permission for foreign travel, especially together with his wife.
There were some periods when travel was possible, and on the whole he traveled more than most Soviet scientists. For example, in 1947, he was a part of an expedition to Brazil organized by the Soviet Academy of Sciences. They conducted radio observations on board the Soviet ship Griboyedov on the occasion of the total solar eclipse on May 20. During the second half of the 1960s, he was allowed to travel to the West and was even permitted to visit the United States on three occasions, in 1965, 1967, and 1969. He was elected to full membership of the Science Academy in 1966 and thereafter even his wife could sometimes accompany him. The high point of this period was in 1967, when he spent a few months in Cambridge, England.
But in most cases, his applications for permission to travel were declined, citing his possession of state secrets from his work on classified projects. This was only an excuse; some people were allowed to travel more easily although they possessed more secrets than Ginzburg. The lowest point was when the authorities did not let him attend an international physics meeting in Kiev(!), that is, within the borders of the Soviet Union. Landau was also forbidden to go, but Landau declared that he would go anyway, and the authorities, wanting to save face, relented. Ginzburg did not make such a fuss but later regretted his inaction, and felt humiliated for as long as he lived.
Ginzburg had been Tamm’s deputy as the theoretical department head and following Tamm’s death in 1971, he was appointed to be head of the department, which was named after Tamm. Ginzburg’s appointment was inevitable because at the time the two ranking members of the department—the two full members of the Academy—were Ginzburg and Sakharov. Sakharov had already been involved in his “dissident” activities, so he could have not been appointed. Ginzburg was the department head for seventeen years. By the end of his tenure the department had grown considerably. It included sixty associates and seven members of the Academy—three full members and four corresponding members.23 It carried great relative weight in FIAN because the theoretical department had as many Academy members as the rest of the Institute.
Ginzburg greatly respected Sakharov both as a physicist and as a human being, but Sakharov being a member of his department also caused problems. The two worked out a tacit agreement for maintaining their lives in a mutually acceptable manner.24 On his part, Sakharov kept his social and political activities separated from the department, and never asked department members to sign his petitions and other documents. The department considered Sakharov one of its members during his entire predicament, including his years of exile to Gorky. Once or twice annually, department members traveled to Gorky to keep Sakharov informed about developments in physics, and Ginzburg visited him twice. It gave him a strange feeling to be traveling to Gorky to visit an exiled person, reminding him of the time that his wife was exiled there three decades before.
When the political changes came at the very end of the 1980s, Ginzburg was still sufficiently fit to enjoy his greater freedom, and he attended meetings and wrote articles as part of his enhanced activities. By the time his Nobel Prize was announced in 2003, his possibilities were more limited because of age and general well-being. I met with him within a year of his new life as a Nobel laureate, and detected no elation in his demeanor, as sometimes characterizes people in similar situations. Also, he was not one of those laureates who would claim that they had never thought about the possibility of winning the award or that it was a complete surprise. He had thought about it, but after a while decided that he had been passed over. He had a few reasons for thinking so and he spoke about them freely.25
October 7, 2003, was a memorable day for Ginzburg. He was sitting at his desk in his office at FIAN. He knew that it was the day when the Nobel Prize in Physics would be announced, but he did not give it much thought. He was writing a letter to his daughter. Suddenly, the telephone rang and a voice in English told him, “This is from Stockholm; you have received the Nobel Prize.” He might have thought that somebody was making a joke. However, the caller further told him that he shared the prize with Alexei Abrikosov and Anthony Leggett. At that moment Ginzburg understood that it was for real. Abrikosov’s name brought home this reality. He did not know anything about Leggett. He knew that there had been nominations for the three of them, Abrikosov, Lev Gorkov, and himself as early as the early 1970s. Landau might have been in their group, but he had already received his Nobel Prize in 1962.
In his Nobel lecture, Ginzburg alluded to the fact that it was a long wait for him to receive his Nobel recognition, but he did this with taste and humor.26 He said that he was eighty-seven years old; the prize almost would have had to be given posthumously if they had waited any longer. He then added a twist by saying that there were no posthumous Nobel Prizes and such recognition would have meant very little to him anyway, because he did not believe in life after death. He was especially glad to have received the Nobel Prize because the two persons whom he always considered his teachers had also been given this distinction, Igor Tamm in 1958 and Lev Landau in 1962.
The title of Ginzburg’s Nobel lecture was “On Superconductivity and Superfluidity.” His prize was given for the development of the “Ginzburg-Landau theory of superconductivity,” which in the Russian literature is known by the name of the “Ψ-theory of superconductivity” (Ψ being the capital psi of the Greek alphabet). In fact, in Western literature, this theory had often been referred to as the Landau-Ginzburg theory of superconductivity. Ginzburg explained to me that this was incorrect, but that previously he had not thought it prudent to correct this usage lest people think that he was placing himself in front of Landau as a physicist.27 This was not the case, and Ginzburg considered Landau to be a greater physicist. However, the Ψ-theory was primarily Ginzburg’s work; he just consulted with Landau on a few occasions. Landau’s contribution was that Ginzburg followed Landau’s theory of phase transitions published in 1937. The introduction of the Ψ wave function in the description of superconductivity meant the expression of order; in other words, Ψ plays a role of an order parameter. The importance of the theory was enhanced by the discovery of high-temperature superconductivity; Ginzburg estimated that during the decade following the discovery of Georg Bednorz and Alexander Müller, there were about fifty thousand papers published on the topic, that is, about fifteen papers daily!28
The science Nobel laureates in December 2003 in Stockholm, from left to right, Peter Mansfield, Vitaly Ginzburg, Peter Agre, Anthony Leggett, Roderick MacKinnon, and Paul Lauterbur (Alexei Abrikosov is missing from this picture).
Source: Courtesy of Anthony Leggett, Urbana, Illinois.
Ginzburg had long been interested in the institution of the Nobel Prize. It was not just because of his desire to receive it. On a broader scale, he was especially interested in why several outstanding Soviet and Russian physicists had never been honored by this award, in particular, L. I. Mandelstam and G. S. Landsberg, who had discovered in 1928 what has become known as the Raman Effect. Raman made his discovery also in 1928 and was awarded the Nobel Prize for it in 1930. For a long time, Ginzburg and many others in Russia believed that Mandelstam and Landsberg had not been awarded the Nobel Prize because of the anti-Soviet sentiments of the award givers. This was also the party line. In reality, however, Mandelstam and Landsberg hardly received any nominations, the only exception being a nomination from the Soviet physicist Orest Khvolson (the author of the young Ginzburg’s favorite physics book). There was insufficient publicity for the discovery by Mandelstam and Landsberg; whereas Raman, as soon as he made his discovery, sent out a bulletin about it to numerous Nobel laureates, asking for their support.
Ginzburg also cited the case of V. N. Ipatev, an important chemist who after the 1917 revolution dedicated himself to developing the chemical industry in the Soviet Union. However, in the 1930s he, like many others, became the target of government attacks at the conclusion of a foreign visit. Next time he was abroad, he did not return to the Soviet Union. In 1931, when Ipatev was still in the Soviet Union, two German chemists, Carl Bosch and Friedrich Bergius, received the Nobel Prize in Chemistry for their contributions to high-pressure methods in chemistry. Ipatev could have been included in this prize. There was an article in the Herald of the Russian Academy of Science in 1997 arguing that Ipatev had been overlooked because he had collaborated with the Soviet government.29 By then, however, the archives of the Nobel Prize documents of the years around 1931 could be investigated, and there was not a single nomination for Ipatev. Not even a Soviet chemist had sent any nomination for Ipatev, whereas many Soviet chemists received invitations to submit nominations.
Abrikosov had been very active in disseminating the results of Soviet researchers in the areas mentioned in the motivation formulated by the Nobel Prize: “for contributions to the understanding of superconductivity and superfluidity.” Ginzburg’s paper with Landau appeared in 1950, but Ginzburg had been working in this field since 1943. Ginzburg was aware of nominations that included Abrikosov, Ginzburg, and Gorkov. Their names were linked in 1966 when they jointly received the Lenin Prize. It was soon after that, according to Ginzburg, that Abrikosov and Gorkov decided to get nominated for the Nobel Prize. They told Ginzburg that they wanted to include him as well. So, all three wrote up their own contributions. The question was who should submit the nomination, because self-nomination is not allowed. Abrikosov suggested asking Ilya Frank, who by then was a Nobel laureate. However, Ginzburg did not want Frank involved because he, Ginzburg, had helped get Frank nominated, and their request would have looked like asking for payback. Abrikosov did ask Frank, however, and Frank submitted a nomination. Subsequently, the three were nominated several times. In 2003, Gorkov was omitted from the award. Ginzburg was surprised; he called Gorkov “a wonderful physicist,” and had no explanation for the omission. However, he found this omission less conspicuous than what happened in 1997 when three physicists, Steven Chu, Claude Cohen-Tannoudji, and William Phillips, received the prize for the laser cooling of atoms. At that time there was a lot of discussion in Russia that the Russian physicist V. S. Letokhov was omitted.30
Ginzburg had an extraordinary overview of physics. He devoted a tremendous amount of time to reading, and his interest defined his weekly seminars. By 2001, he had held altogether 1700 seminars. Ginzburg’s seminar was famous; people from all over Moscow used to attend it at FIAN, and when out-of-town physicists were visiting Moscow, they also joined it. The seminars were friendly; Ginzburg encouraged participation. There was none of Landau’s sarcasm or impatience there.
In the early 1970s, Ginzburg began compiling lists of challenges for physics. It was a roster of unsolved problems that he thought should be attacked and, hopefully, solved. The list kept expanding. It was not merely a list; Ginzburg augmented it with commentaries that showed his deep understanding of the problems. It provided assistance to physicists who were looking for ideas and projects. As Ginzburg was concluding his Nobel lecture on December 8, 2003, in Stockholm, he added a section about the especially important and interesting problems of physics and astrophysics in the beginning of the twenty-first century.31 Now he listed thirty problems with controlled nuclear fusion as number one. His interest in collecting the most important problems of contemporary physics prompted me to ask Ginzburg about his personal choice of a project or projects if he could be twenty-five years old again.
Ginzburg initially declined to answer because he was against making such choices. He preferred a broad base, and his scientific career was an example of the benefits of being engaged in numerous areas.32 He was well aware of the fact that the results of scientific research were not long lasting in the sense that they are soon overtaken by yet newer findings—this was the nature of scientific progress. Creativity in science differs from creativity in the arts. There are products of the arts that are forever associated with the names of their creators, but in science, most discoveries are built into the edifice of science. Only the most conspicuous discoveries find their way into textbooks, and this is what only the greatest of the greats may hope for; all the others disappear in oblivion.
Ginzburg was highly prolific. He published a large number of scientific papers, and by the end of the 1980s he estimated the number of his publications as approaching one thousand—something very rare, especially among physicists.33 For the fifteen-year period 1961–1975, he was among the five top-cited Soviet scientists, with close to seven thousand citations. But he saw clearly that much of his writing in physics would become obsolete as science progressed. The thought of longevity of scientific production clearly made him wonder. He told me about another scientist’s approach to this problem.
When Yakov Zeldovich was nearing his seventieth birthday, he devoted two years to collecting and commenting on his scientific production. He was assisted by some of his associates.34 Zeldovich thought that his two-volume compilation would be useful for posterity. Not long after Zeldovich had completed the two volumes, he died. Because he had been a foreign member of the Royal Society (London), Ginzburg, being another foreign member, was asked to write a biographical memoir about Zeldovich. These bibliographical memoirs are detailed treatises, and Ginzburg made much use of Zeldovich’s two volumes in producing his composition for the Royal Society series.35
Vitaly Ginzburg and Istvan Hargittai in September 2004 in Ginzburg’s office at FIAN (by unknown photographer).
When Zeldovich gave Ginzburg his two volumes as a gift, he said, “You will soon be 70 years old,” and suggested to Ginzburg that he follow his example and compile his own two volumes.36 Ginzburg liked the idea but was reluctant to take up the huge task of organizing such a compilation. Besides, Ginzburg’s production, at least considering its volume and the number of his publications, was much larger than his friend’s. He decided instead to compile his scientific autobiography, emphasizing the works he considered most important.37 This autobiography shows that he worked in many areas in theoretical physics, and he could easily change his focus of research from one area to another.
When I talked with Ginzburg, our first topic was about a general characterization of his life, which appeared to me to carry considerable constancy in that he had lived all his life in Moscow and FIAN remained his only workplace. In response, he quoted what people used to say in Soviet times. “Question: What is constant under the Soviets? Answer: Temporary difficulties.”38 Of course, behind the apparent constancy, there were genuinely difficult times in Ginzburg’s life. He wondered whether he could have performed better in science under less trying conditions. He was not sure, but this question had occurred to him, and a decade and a half earlier he had written: “[I]f I had lived under better conditions, I would have probably been happier and have rested and seen more. But the integral of my scientific activity, if I may say so, most probably would not be larger than it is.”39
At some point in our conversation, Ginzburg overcame his initial aversion to my question. Were he twenty-five years old again, but in possession of his accumulated experience and knowledge, he said he was sure he would again become a theoretical physicist. Then, he added: “I have a prayer…. As you know, Jewish men have such a prayer in which they thank God that he did not make them into women. In my prayer, I am thanking God for having made me into a theoretical physicist. This does not mean that I have anything against experimental physicists. In my eyes they have the most difficult job possible. They have to sit at some apparatus all their lives. What the great luck of the theoretical physicist is that he can easily change his topics all the time.”
After further contemplation—it was obvious that he had warmed to the challenge of the question—he gave me this response about his hypothetical choice of research project for a twenty-five-year old Ginzburg:
I always dealt with many problems. This is why I cannot give you a specific response to your question about what would be my choice today if I were 25 years old again. Problems in theoretical physics would be sufficient to keep busy a thousand Ginzburgs. If then, taking a closer look at theoretical physics, I do have some fixed ideas. From 1964, I have been interested in high-temperature superconductivity. Today, the question is about room-temperature superconductivity. Could we make a superconductor that it would be possible to utilize at room temperature for which, for example, water-cooling would suffice? This is what I find to be a most interesting problem. It may not be the greatest challenge in physics today, but I would probably select this one to pursue it further if I could suddenly become young again.
I found Ginzburg, even at the age of eighty-eight, to be young in spirit, and this is how I remember him. For many, he has remained an inspiration.
