- Person
- Vitaly Ginzburg
- Lived
- 1916–2009
- Field
- Theoretical physics
- From
- Russian
The story
Some scientific institutions are built of bricks; others are built of habits. From the middle of the 1950s Vitaly Ginzburg ran a physics seminar at the Lebedev Physical Institute in Moscow every Wednesday. Running for two hours, it became, in his own understated words, rather popular, attended by many people from Moscow and from other cities as well.
Its importance owed much to the conditions of Soviet science. For decades Ginzburg himself was refused permission to travel abroad, officially for reasons of secrecy. In 1959 he was not even allowed to attend a major international physics conference held in Kiev, and he counted among his greatest regrets that he never had the chance to meet Albert Einstein. For physicists cut off in this way from foreign colleagues, a lively weekly forum where new results from around the world were reported and argued over was a vital link to the wider world of ideas.
Ginzburg's own range made the seminar unusually broad. He worked on superconductivity, the propagation of radio waves, ferroelectrics, plasma physics, cosmic rays and astrophysics, and his famous list of the most important unsolved problems in physics reflected the same wide curiosity. The Wednesday meetings became a gathering place for generations of researchers.
In 2001, feeling his health declining, he decided it was time to stop. He recalled a popular saying from the Khrushchev years about knowing when enough is enough. On 21 November 2001 the 1,700th seminar was held as a cheerful jubilee party, like the 1,500th and 1,600th before it. Then, after telling a story about an actress who kept performing until she could no longer walk, he announced, to everyone's surprise, that the seminar was closing down. He could still walk, he explained, but the seminar had to end some day and he wanted to end it in time.
Two years later, at the age of 87, he travelled to Stockholm to receive the Nobel Prize in Physics. His obituary in Physics Today recorded that the Wednesday seminars had reached 1,700 talks.
Why it matters
Ginzburg's seminar educated and connected thousands of physicists over nearly half a century, helping keep Soviet and Russian science lively and open to the world.
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 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.
Sources
- Vitaly L. Ginzburg, Biographical NobelPrize.org
- Vitaly Lazarevich Ginzburg (obituary) Physics Today
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