A lonely Moscow childhood
Vitaly Lazarevich Ginzburg was born in Moscow on October 4, 1916, September 21 by the old Russian calendar, into a Jewish family, a few months before the revolution that would remake his country. His father, Lazar Efimovich Ginzburg, born in 1863 and trained at Riga Polytechnic, was a water-purification engineer with several patents; his mother, Avgusta Vildauer-Ginzburg, was a doctor from Mitava in Latvia. She died of typhoid in 1920, when Vitaly was three, and her younger sister Rosa moved in and raised him. He was an only child.
The family lived through the hunger of war communism in a Moscow flat into which, after the revolution, two other families had been moved. What stayed with him most, he wrote, was loneliness: his father and aunt, distrusting the new Soviet schools, kept him at home until he was eleven. When a school reform abolished the upper grades in 1931, the fifteen-year-old was left adrift, until a professor helped him find work as a laboratory assistant in an X-ray laboratory. There, working beside young experimenters, he caught what he called a taste for work, for physics and for inventiveness.
From optics to theory
To enter Moscow State University he crammed three years of school mathematics into three months. He passed the exams in 1933 but was not admitted, others with lower marks but more suitable proletarian backgrounds got in, so he enrolled as an external student and in 1934 transferred into the regular course. Convinced that his mathematical ability was no more than average, he chose to specialise in optics under Grigory Landsberg rather than risk theoretical physics.
The turn came in 1938. Bored with measurements in a darkened laboratory, he tried to explain an effect theoretically and took his idea to Igor Tamm, who headed theoretical physics at the university. Tamm did not immediately see that the idea was wrong, received the young man warmly and encouraged him. Ginzburg soon found he could solve real problems in quantum electrodynamics without elaborate mathematics. He defended his candidate’s dissertation in 1940, joined the Lebedev Physical Institute of the Academy of Sciences (FIAN) on September 1 of that year, and stayed there for the rest of his life. He took his doctorate in 1942, in wartime Kazan, where the institute had been evacuated and where he worked on the propagation of radio waves for the war effort.
The Ginzburg–Landau theory
Superconductivity, the complete disappearance of electrical resistance in certain metals cooled to a few degrees above absolute zero, had been discovered in 1911, but decades later there was still no satisfactory theory of it. In 1950 Ginzburg and Lev Landau published a new approach. Rather than deriving the phenomenon from the behaviour of individual electrons, they described the superconducting state with an “order parameter” a quantity that is zero in the normal metal and grows as the material becomes superconducting, and wrote equations governing how it varies in space and responds to magnetic fields.
The Ginzburg–Landau equations explained how superconductors expel magnetic fields, predicted the behaviour of the boundary between normal and superconducting regions, and introduced a single number, the Ginzburg–Landau parameter, that distinguishes two kinds of superconductors. Within a few years Alexei Abrikosov used the theory to explain type-II superconductors, which remain superconducting in strong magnetic fields. The approach proved far more general than its authors expected: once the microscopic BCS theory appeared in 1957, the Ginzburg–Landau equations were shown to follow from it, and the order-parameter method spread into the physics of superfluids, phase transitions and even particle physics.
A Jew, a party member, a wife in exile
In 1937 Ginzburg married a fellow student, Olga Zamsha; their daughter Irina was born in 1939, and the marriage ended in 1946. That year, while teaching at the university in Gorky, he married Nina Ermakova. Her father, an engineer, had been arrested before the war and died in prison; Nina herself had been arrested in 1944 on an invented charge of belonging to a group plotting to shoot Stalin from the window of her family’s Arbat flat, which, it turned out, faced the courtyard. Released in 1945 but barred from Moscow, she lived in internal exile near Gorky. Ginzburg applied every year for permission for her to join him and was refused until after Stalin’s death; she was rehabilitated in 1956. They were still together 57 years later, when he wrote his Nobel autobiography.
In the late 1940s, as Stalin’s campaign against “rootless cosmopolitans”, a thinly veiled assault on Jews, gathered force, Ginzburg was an obvious target: a party member (he had joined in 1942, when the Germans reached the Volga), married to a former political prisoner, and, as he put it, a Jew at that. On his birthday in 1947 a newspaper attacked him for servility to the West, and the same day his promotion to professor was blocked. He believed that worse would have followed had he not been saved, in his words, by the hydrogen bomb.
The hydrogen bomb
In 1948 Tamm was asked to form a group at FIAN to study the possibility of a thermonuclear weapon, and Ginzburg and the young Andrei Sakharov joined it. Sakharov proposed the “first idea” a layered design; Ginzburg contributed the “second idea”: using lithium-6 deuteride as fuel, because neutrons striking lithium-6 produce tritium, which then fuses with deuterium. Together, the ideas made the first Soviet hydrogen bomb possible, tested in August 1953. Ginzburg’s fuel remained central to later designs.
When Tamm and Sakharov moved in 1950 to the secret weapons centre at Arzamas-16, Ginzburg was not cleared to follow, his wife’s record made him a security risk, and he led a small support group in Moscow instead. He regarded the exclusion as a great piece of luck: it left him free to visit his wife and to return to pure science, and it was in exactly these years that he did his work on superconductivity.
A universe of problems
Ginzburg’s range was enormous. He wrote on the propagation of electromagnetic waves in plasmas such as the ionosphere, on the origin of cosmic rays, on ferroelectricity and on many other questions of physics and astrophysics; over his career he published hundreds of papers. After Stalin’s death in 1953 he was elected a corresponding member of the Academy of Sciences, becoming a full member in 1966. In 1968 he founded a department of the problems of physics and astrophysics at the Moscow Institute of Physics and Technology, and in 1971, after Tamm’s death, he reluctantly became head of FIAN’s theoretical department, a post he held until 1988.
For almost half a century he ran a Wednesday seminar at FIAN that drew physicists from across Moscow and beyond; he closed it himself at its 1,700th session in November 2001. He also kept a famous list of the most important unsolved problems in physics and astrophysics, updating it over three decades and presenting it in his Nobel lecture. Yet the Soviet authorities long refused to let him travel abroad; he missed a major international conference held in Kiev in 1959, and twice in the 1980s he was told he could go to Copenhagen only without his wife.
The Nobel Prize at 87
In 2003, more than half a century after the Ginzburg–Landau paper, the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics to Ginzburg, Alexei Abrikosov and Anthony Leggett for pioneering contributions to the theory of superconductors and superfluids. Landau, who had died in 1968, could not share it. The Academy pointed out that theories formulated in the 1950s had gained new importance as materials were made superconducting at ever higher temperatures and in ever stronger magnetic fields. Superconducting magnets, built from type-II materials whose behaviour the Ginzburg–Landau and Abrikosov theories describe, are at the heart of hospital MRI scanners and of the particle accelerators used in physics research.
Atheist, democrat, Jew
Ginzburg described himself plainly as an atheist, and in post-Soviet Russia, as the Orthodox Church regained influence, he became one of its most outspoken scientific critics. In 2007 he was among the members of the Academy of Sciences who signed an open letter to President Vladimir Putin protesting the growing clericalisation of Russian public life. He confessed late in life that he sometimes envied believers, who found illness and old age easier to bear, but that he could not believe in resurrection after death.
He was equally frank about politics. He wrote that for years he had been blind to the true nature of Stalinism, which he later called a regime of a Nazi type. He served as a people’s deputy of the USSR from 1989 to 1991, left the Communist Party in 1991, and in his last years defended scientists accused of espionage and criticised the security services. A secular Jew, he became active in Jewish communal life after the fall of communism, served on the board of the Russian Jewish Congress, spoke out against antisemitism and supported Israel, where one of his granddaughters lives.
Last years and legacy
From 1998 Ginzburg edited the leading Russian physics review journal, Uspekhi Fizicheskikh Nauk, and he continued writing about science, religion and society almost to the end. He died of cardiac arrest in Moscow on November 8, 2009, at the age of 93, and was buried in Novodevichy Cemetery. He left a theory that is still taught to every student of condensed-matter physics and that underlies technologies used daily in hospitals and laboratories, and the example of a scientist who, having lived through Stalin’s terror and its antisemitism, insisted for the rest of his life on reason, candour and the freedom to speak.
Sources & further reading
Vitaly L. Ginzburg, Biographical (autobiography), NobelPrize.org · Press release: The Nobel Prize in Physics 2003, NobelPrize.org · Vitaly Ginzburg, Wikipedia · Researched from the sources above and checked against them. Spotted an error? Tell us.
A life of tikkun olam. This is part of tikkun olam, the Jewish idea of repairing the world, and every one of us can add to it.