Posted on 11/11/2009 9:40:40 AM PST by NormsRevenge
MOSCOW (Reuters) – Vitaly Ginzburg, a Russian physicist who survived Stalin's purges by working on the Soviet atomic bomb project and later won the Nobel Prize for physics, died in Moscow late on Sunday after a long illness. He was 93.
Ginzburg won the 2003 Nobel physics prize for developing the theory behind superconductors, materials which allow electricity to pass without resistance at very low temperatures. He shared the prize with British-American Anthony Leggett and Russian-born U.S. scientist Alexei Abrikosov.
But Ginzburg's career as a Soviet scientist almost ended when he took as his second wife a woman arrested in 1944 and sentenced to three years in labor camps for supposedly plotting against Stalin's life. State anti-Semitism was flourishing and an attack on Ginzburg was published in a journal.
"I can only guess what fate awaited me in this situation at this time," Ginzburg wrote in an autobiographical article written for the Nobel prize committee. "I think that it would have cost me dear but I was saved by the hydrogen bomb."
Ginzburg wrote that he worked together with fellow Soviet physicist Andrei Sakharov -- later a famous dissident -- on the Soviet H-bomb project and said they developed the two key ideas which made it possible to create the device.
But in 1951, Ginzburg was dismissed from the atom bomb project as Stalin led a fresh campaign of anti-Semitism which aimed to blame Jews for the Soviet Union's problems and exile them into labor camps.
(Excerpt) Read more at news.yahoo.com ...
People mourn as they stand around the coffin of prominent Russian physicist Vitaly Ginzburg during a funeral ceremony in Moscow November 11, 2009. Ginzburg, a Russian physicist who survived Stalin's purges by working on the Soviet atomic bomb project and later won the Nobel Prize for physics, died in Moscow late on Sunday after a long illness. He was 93. REUTERS/Sergei Karpukhin
Russian Nobel Physics Prize winner Vitaly Ginzburg talking to journalists at the Academy of Science's P.N. Lebedev Physics Institute in Moscow in 2003. Ginzburg, who helped develop the Soviet hydrogen bomb, has died at age 93, the Russian Academy of Sciences said on Monday. (AFP/File/Tatyana Makeyeva)
So he read the secret reports that spies brought back from the Manhattan Project and for this he’s their hero?
I guess his long life shows he didn’t spend any time around radiation.
Woo Woo!
Does this mean there’s an opening on the Supreme Court?
Nobel Prize winner. Just like Obama, Gore, Carter, and Arafat!
NO.
...
Nobel Prize for Peace is a circle-jerk.
The prizes for work in the sciences are a different matter.
Actually the Russkis ought to be celebrating Klaus Fuchs and Julius Rosenberg who did more to give the Soviets the bomb than any Russian scientist.
Ed Asner could play him in the movie version
The Soviets were independently reaching the same end, using Kurchatov’s work. The Rosenbergs and such only confirmed that Kurchatov was heading in the right direction. Sakharov’s research however was original, including some of his fusion work on the Tokamak.
The research done by the scientists in the Soviet Union (disregarding obvious frauds like Lysenko) is sometimes amazing considering the political crap they had to put up with. The KGB handlers during the Soviet fission bomb project were a real bunch of dunces. Kurchatov was running his equivalent of Chicago Pile 1 while Lavrenty Beria was in attendance. Beria was starting to think that the whole thing was a sham, since there was no noise, no vibration when the fission reaction was taking place. He almost walked into the room where the graphite pile was. If he did, he would have been fried by the neutron flux.
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