- Person
- Vitaly Ginzburg
- Lived
- 1916–2009
- Field
- Theoretical physics
- From
- Russian
The story
Long-distance radio depends on the ionosphere, a layer of electrically charged gas high in the atmosphere that can reflect and bend radio waves. Understanding how waves travel through such plasmas was a practical problem of great importance, above all in wartime.
Vitaly Ginzburg had joined the Lebedev Physical Institute in Moscow in 1940, after a first doctoral thesis on Vavilov-Cherenkov radiation, the light given off by charges moving quickly through a medium. In 1941, after Germany invaded the Soviet Union, the institute was evacuated with much of the Academy of Sciences to Kazan on the Volga, where he spent about two years. Conditions were hard: he, his father, his aunt and his wife shared a single room and were often cold and hungry. Staff were also sent to do manual labour, and he recalled carrying logs from barges onto the riverbank. Yet he worked intensively, studying the propagation of radio waves in the atmosphere and other problems useful for defence, and in 1942 he defended his second doctorate.
After the war his expertise brought an invitation from a group of physicists led by Alexander Andronov to head the chair of propagation and radiation of radio waves in the new radiophysics department at Gorky University. He accepted, and it was in Gorky, at the end of 1945, that he met his future wife Nina.
Wikipedia lists the theory of electromagnetic wave propagation in plasmas, for example in the ionosphere, among his major achievements. The work also pointed him towards the sky. In 1946 he proposed that the solar corona, the Sun's hot outer atmosphere, should emit radio waves in the metre band, an early contribution to radio astronomy. His later studies of radiation from fast electrons in cosmic magnetic fields became central to understanding cosmic rays and the radio emission of distant objects.
The same physics of waves in plasmas underlies radio communication, the study of the upper atmosphere and the radio observations that let astronomers study stars, galaxies and cosmic rays far from Earth.
Why it matters
Ginzburg's theory of waves in plasmas supported long-distance radio communication and laid groundwork for radio astronomy and space physics.
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 founded a department to train physicistsIn 1968 Vitaly Ginzburg founded the Department of Problems of Physics and Astrophysics at the Moscow Institute of Physics and Technology, which he headed for decades.
- 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'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
- Vitaly Lazarevich Ginzburg (obituary) Physics Today
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