- Person
- Vitaly Ginzburg
- Lived
- 1916–2009
- Field
- Theoretical physics
- From
- Russian
The story
Vitaly Ginzburg had always wanted to teach. After the Second World War, theoretical physicists including his mentor Igor Tamm had effectively been pushed out of Moscow State University, and Ginzburg had nowhere in the capital to lecture. In 1945 a group of physicists led by Alexander Andronov invited him to Gorky University, where he headed the chair of propagation and radiation of radio waves in a newly founded radiophysics department. For years he travelled there to lecture and to train postgraduates, many of them with an astrophysical bent.
In 1968 he founded a new chair at the Moscow Institute of Physics and Technology, widely known as Phystech: the department of problems of physics and astrophysics. Its name reflected his conviction that young physicists should be educated across the whole breadth of their subject and should see how the physics of the laboratory connects with the physics of stars and galaxies. He headed it for decades, alongside his research at the Lebedev Physical Institute, where he succeeded Tamm as head of the theoretical department in 1971.
In his Nobel autobiography, written in 2003, he noted that he no longer gave lectures at Phystech but remained head of the department without pay, at his own wish and at the staff's request, so that he could continue to help it solve its problems.
Teaching and mentoring ran through his whole life. His doctoral students included Leonid Keldysh and Viatcheslav Mukhanov, both of whom became distinguished physicists. Ginzburg himself preferred a broader definition: he counted as his pupils those who considered him their teacher, and he said he had tried to follow the supportive example Tamm had set for him as a young man. From 1998 he also served as editor-in-chief of Physics-Uspekhi, the leading Russian review journal in physics.
His mix of teaching, editing and his weekly Wednesday seminar made him one of the central figures in Russian physics education. The idea behind his Phystech department, that a physicist needs a wide view of the whole field, also inspired his famous list of the key unsolved problems in physics and astrophysics.
Why it matters
Through his department at Phystech, his many students and his editorship of Physics-Uspekhi, Ginzburg shaped the training of generations of Russian physicists and astrophysicists.
About Vitaly Ginzburg
Soviet-Jewish physicist whose Ginzburg–Landau theory of superconductivity won the 2003 Nobel Prize, and who survived Stalin’s antisemitic purges to become a fearless public voice.
More about Vitaly Ginzburg
- Vitaly Ginzburg helped bring genetics back to the USSRVitaly Ginzburg was among the scientists who helped end the dominance of Trofim Lysenko, the politically connected opponent of genetics, allowing modern genetic science to return to the Soviet Union.
- Vitaly Ginzburg co-created the theory of superconductorsIn 1950 Vitaly Ginzburg and Lev Landau published the Ginzburg–Landau theory of superconductivity, which became fundamental to all later work on superconductors and won Ginzburg the 2003 Nobel Prize.
- Vitaly Ginzburg kept a famous list of physics' big questionsFor three decades Vitaly Ginzburg compiled and updated a list of the most important unsolved problems in physics, publishing 30 problems for the 21st century in 1999.
- Vitaly Ginzburg developed a theory of cosmic ray originsVitaly Ginzburg developed a theory of the origin of cosmic rays, the high-energy particles that rain on Earth from space, work honoured by the cosmic ray physicists' Ó Ceallaigh Medal.
- Vitaly Ginzburg explained how radio waves cross the skyDuring the Second World War and after, Vitaly Ginzburg developed the theory of how electromagnetic waves travel through plasmas such as the ionosphere, vital for long-distance radio.
- Vitaly Ginzburg's theory underpins MRI magnetsSuperconducting magnets in hospital MRI scanners and particle accelerators rely on type-II superconductors, whose behaviour is described by the theory Vitaly Ginzburg helped create.
- Vitaly Ginzburg ran a physics seminar for 1,700 sessionsFrom the mid-1950s Vitaly Ginzburg ran a weekly Wednesday physics seminar in Moscow that drew scientists from across the city and beyond, closing it at its 1,700th session in November 2001.
Sources
- Vitaly L. Ginzburg, Biographical NobelPrize.org
- Vitaly Ginzburg Wikipedia
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