Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic
The Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic known as the Russian Soviet Republic and the Russian Socialist Federative Soviet Republic, as well as being unofficially known as the Russian Federation, Soviet Russia, or Russia, was an independent state from 1917 to 1922, afterwards the largest, most populous and most economically developed of the 15 Soviet socialist republics of the Soviet Union from 1922 to 1990 a sovereign part of the Soviet Union with priority of Russian laws over Union-level legislation in 1990 and 1991, during the last two years of the existence of the USSR. The Russian Republic comprised sixteen smaller constituent units of autonomous republics, five autonomous oblasts, ten autonomous okrugs, six krais and forty oblasts. Russians formed the largest ethnic group; the capital of the Russian SFSR was Moscow and the other major urban centers included Leningrad, Yekaterinburg, Nizhny Novgorod and Samara. The economy of Russia became industrialized, accounting for about two-thirds of the electricity produced in the USSR.
By 1961, it was the third largest producer of petroleum due to new discoveries in the Volga-Urals region and Siberia, trailing in production to only the United States and Saudi Arabia. In 1974, there were 475 institutes of higher education in the republic providing education in 47 languages to some 23,941,000 students. A network of territorially organized public-health services provided health care. After 1985, the "perestroika" restructuring policies of the Gorbachev administration liberalised the economy, which had become stagnant since the late 1970s under General Secretary Leonid Brezhnev, with the introduction of non-state owned enterprises such as cooperatives; the Russian Soviet Republic was proclaimed on 7 November 1917 as a sovereign state and the world's first constitutionally socialist state with the ideology of Communism. The first Constitution was adopted in 1918. In 1922, the Russian SFSR signed the Treaty on the Creation of the USSR setting up of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics.
The 1977 Soviet Constitution stated that "Union Republic is a sovereign state that has united in the Union" and "each Union Republic shall retain the right to secede from the USSR". On 12 June 1990, the Congress of People's Deputies adopted the Declaration of State Sovereignty, established separation of powers, established citizenship of Russia and stated that the RSFSR shall retain the right of free secession from the USSR. On 12 June 1991, Boris Yeltsin, supported by the Democratic Russia pro-reform movement, was elected the first and only President of the RSFSR, a post that would become the presidency of the Russian Federation; the August 1991 Soviet coup d'état attempt with the temporary brief internment of President Mikhail Gorbachev destabilised the Soviet Union. On 8 December 1991, the heads of Russia and Belarus signed the Belavezha Accords; the agreement declared dissolution of the USSR by its original founding states and established the Commonwealth of Independent States as a loose confederation.
On 12 December, the agreement was ratified by the Supreme Soviet. On 25 December 1991, following the resignation of Gorbachev as President of the Soviet Union, the Russian SFSR was renamed the Russian Federation, with President Yeltsin re-establishing the sovereign and independent state. With the lowering at 12 midnight of the red flag with hammer and sickle design of the now former USSR from the towers of the Kremlin in Moscow on 26 December 1991, the USSR was self-dissolved by the Soviet of the Republics, which by that time was the only functioning chamber of the parliamentary Supreme Soviet. After dissolution of the USSR, Russia declared that it assumed the rights and obligations of the dissolved central Soviet government, including UN membership and permanent membership on the Security Council, but excluding foreign debt and foreign assets of the USSR; the 1978 RSFSR Constitution was amended several times to reflect the transition to democracy, private property and market economy. The new Russian Constitution, coming into effect on 25 December 1993 after a constitutional crisis abolished the Soviet form of government and replaced it with a semi-presidential system.
Under the leadership of Vladimir Lenin and Leon Trotsky, the Bolshevik communists established the Soviet state on 7 November 1917 after the interim Russian Provisional Government, most led by opposing democratic socialist Alexander Kerensky, which governed the new Russian Republic after the overthrow of the Russian Empire government of the Romanov imperial dynasty of Czar Nicholas II the previous March, was now itself overthrown during the following October Revolution, the second of t
Cherenkov radiation
Cherenkov radiation is an electromagnetic radiation emitted when a charged particle passes through a dielectric medium at a speed greater than the phase velocity of light in that medium. The characteristic blue glow of an underwater nuclear reactor is due to Cherenkov radiation; the radiation is named after the Soviet scientist Pavel Cherenkov, the 1958 Nobel Prize winner, the first to detect it experimentally under the supervision of Sergey Vavilov at the Lebedev Institute in 1934. Therefore it is known as Vavilov–Cherenkov radiation. Cherenkov saw a faint bluish light around a radioactive preparation in water during experiments, his doctorate thesis was on luminescence of uranium salt solutions that were excited by gamma rays instead of less energetic visible light, as done commonly. He discovered the anisotropy of the radiation and came to the conclusion that the bluish glow was not a fluorescent phenomenon. A theory of this effect was developed in 1937 within the framework of Einstein's special relativity theory by Cherenkov's colleagues Igor Tamm and Ilya Frank, who shared the 1958 Nobel Prize.
Cherenkov radiation as conical wave front had been theoretically predicted by the English polymath Oliver Heaviside in papers published between 1888 and 1889 and by Arnold Sommerfeld in 1904, but both had been forgotten following the relativity theory's restriction of super-c particles until the 1970s. Marie Curie observed a pale blue light in a concentrated radium solution in 1910, but did not investigate its source. In 1926, the French radiotherapists Lucien Mallet described the luminous radiation of radium irradiating water having a continuous spectrum. While electrodynamics holds that the speed of light in a vacuum is a universal constant, the speed at which light propagates in a material may be less than c. For example, the speed of the propagation of light in water is only 0.75c. Matter can be accelerated beyond this speed during nuclear reactions and in particle accelerators. Cherenkov radiation results when a charged particle, most an electron, travels through a dielectric medium with a speed greater than that at which light propagates in the same medium.
A common analogy is the sonic boom of a supersonic aircraft. The sound waves generated by the supersonic body propagate at the speed of sound itself. In a similar way, a charged particle can generate a light shock wave as it travels through an insulator. Moreover, the velocity that must be exceeded is the phase velocity of light rather than the group velocity of light; the phase velocity can be altered by employing a periodic medium, in that case one can achieve Cherenkov radiation with no minimum particle velocity, a phenomenon known as the Smith–Purcell effect. In a more complex periodic medium, such as a photonic crystal, one can obtain a variety of other anomalous Cherenkov effects, such as radiation in a backwards direction whereas ordinary Cherenkov radiation forms an acute angle with the particle velocity. In their original work on the theoretical foundations of Cherenkov radiation and Frank wrote,"This peculiar radiation can evidently not be explained by any common mechanism such as the interaction of the fast electron with individual atom or as radiative scattering of electrons on atomic nuclei.
On the other hand, the phenomenon can be explained both qualitatively and quantitatively if one takes in account the fact that an electron moving in a medium does radiate light if it is moving uniformly provided that its velocity is greater than the velocity of light in the medium.". However, some misconceptions regarding Cherenkov radiation exist: for example, it is believed that the medium becomes electrically polarized by the particle's electric field. If the particle travels then the disturbance elastically relaxes back to mechanical equilibrium as the particle passes; when the particle is traveling fast enough, the limited response speed of the medium means that a disturbance is left in the wake of the particle, the energy contained in this disturbance radiates as a coherent shockwave. Such conceptions do not have any analytical foundation, as electromagnetic radiation is emitted when charged particles move in a dielectric medium at subluminal velocities which are not considered as Cherenkov radiation.
In the figure on the geometry, the particle travels in a medium with speed v p such that c / n < v p < c,where c is speed of light in vacuum, n is the refractive index of the medium. If the medium is water, the condition is 0.75 c < v p < c, since n = 1.33 for water at 20 °C. We define the ratio between the speed of the speed of light as β = v p / c; the emitted light waves travel at speed v em =. The left corner of the triangle represents the location of the superluminal particle at some initial moment; the right corner of the triangle is the location of the particle at some time t. In the given ti
Surface states
Surface states are electronic states found at the surface of materials. They are formed due to the sharp transition from solid material that ends with a surface and are found only at the atom layers closest to the surface; the termination of a material with a surface leads to a change of the electronic band structure from the bulk material to the vacuum. In the weakened potential at the surface, new electronic states can be formed, so called surface states; as stated by Bloch's theorem, eigenstates of the single-electron Schrödinger equation with a periodic potential, a crystal, are Bloch waves Ψ n k = e i k ⋅ r u n k. Here u n k is a function with the same periodicity as the crystal, n is the band index and k is the wave number; the allowed wave numbers for a given potential are found by applying the usual Born–von Karman cyclic boundary conditions. The termination of a crystal, i.e. the formation of a surface causes deviation from perfect periodicity. If the cyclic boundary conditions are abandoned in the direction normal to the surface the behavior of electrons will deviate from the behavior in the bulk and some modifications of the electronic structure has to be expected.
A simplified model of the crystal potential in one dimension can be sketched as shown in Figure 1. In the crystal, the potential has the periodicity, a, of the lattice while close to the surface it has to somehow attain the value of the vacuum level; the step potential shown in Figure 1 is an oversimplification, convenient for simple model calculations. At a real surface the potential is influenced by image charges and the formation of surface dipoles and it rather looks as indicated by the dashed line. Given the potential in Figure 1, it can be shown that the one-dimensional single-electron Schrödinger equation gives two qualitatively different types of solutions; the first type of states has Bloch character there. These type of solutions correspond to bulk states which terminate in an exponentially decaying tail reaching into the vacuum; the second type of states decays exponentially both into the bulk crystal. These type of solutions correspond to surface states, with wave functions localized close to the crystal surface.
The first type of solution can be obtained for both semiconductors. In semiconductors though, the associated eigenenergies have to belong to one of the allowed energy bands; the second type of solution exists in forbidden energy gap of semiconductors as well as in local gaps of the projected band structure of metals. It can be shown; as a consequence, in the crystal these states are characterized by an imaginary wavenumber leading to an exponential decay into the bulk. In the discussion of surface states, one distinguishes between Shockley states and Tamm states, named after the American physicist William Shockley and the Russian physicist Igor Tamm. However, there is no real physical distinction between the two terms, only the mathematical approach in describing surface states is different. Surface states that arise as solutions to the Schrödinger equation in the framework of the nearly free electron approximation for clean and ideal surfaces, are called Shockley states. Shockley states are thus states that arise due to the change in the electron potential associated with the crystal termination.
This approach is suited to describe some narrow gap semiconductors. Figures 1 and 2 are examples of Shockley states, derived using the nearly free electron approximation. Surface states that are calculated in the framework of a tight-binding model are called Tamm states. In the tight binding approach, the electronic wave functions are expressed as linear combinations of atomic orbitals. In contrast to the nearly free electron model used to describe the Shockley states, the Tamm states are suitable to describe transition metals and wide gap semiconductors. All materials can be classified by a topological invariant. In certain materials the topological invariant can be changed when certain bulk energy bands invert due to strong spin-orbital coupling. At the interface between an insulator with non-trivial topology, a so-called topological insulator, one with a trivial topology, the interface must become metallic. More over, the surface state must have linear Dirac-like dispersion with a crossing point, protected by time reversal symmetry.
Such a state is predicted to be robust under disorder, therefore cannot be localized. SEE http://rmp.aps.org/abstract/RMP/v82/i4/p3045_1 A simple model for the derivation of the basic properties of states at a metal surface is a semi-infinite periodic chain of identical atoms. In this model, the termination of the chain represents the surface, where the potential attains the value V0 of the vacuum in the form of a step function, figure 1. Within the crystal the
Moscow State Pedagogical University
Moscow State Pedagogical University or Moscow State University of Education is a major educational and scientific institution in Moscow, with eighteen faculties and seven branches in other Russian cities. The institution has operated under a series of names since 1872; the university originates in Vladimir Guerrier's Higher Women's Courses and was founded in 1872 as Moscow University for Women. It was subsequently reconstituted several times. In 1918 it admitted men and became the Second Moscow State University was reformed without its Medical and Chemical Technology schools as the Moscow State Pedagogical Institute, which for a time was known as the Moscow State V. I. Lenin Pedagogical Institute. In 1990, the Institute regained the status of university and thus its present name. In May 1872 the Russian Minister of Education, Count Dmitry Tolstoy, consented to the opening by Professor Guerrier of "Higher Women's Courses" as a private educational institution and approved Regulations for this purpose.
In November 1872, the first building of the Moscow Higher Women's Courses was opened at Volkhonka, ushering in the era of higher education for women in Russia. Courses were for two years and were in humanities and natural sciences. At first, there were History & Philology and Physics & Mathematics. In Moscow alone, 1,232 women were admitted to the courses between 1872 and 1886. A female student attending a course became known as a kursistka. While still a young doctor, Anton Chekhov paid for his sister Masha to attend Guerrier courses. In 1886, the Ministry of Education prevented the admission of new students to Guerrier's courses, they ended in 1888. Following the end of the Guerrier courses, public lectures for women were organized systematically, most of them given by the same teachers, in the same premises, as before; the public lectures lasted until 1892. From 1886 there were collective lessons, with a bias towards the natural sciences. In 1900 the name Moscow Higher Women's Courses was instituted, in 1906 a School of Medicine was launched.
Courses were taught by outstanding scholars. In 1907, educational buildings by the architect Soloviev opened in Little Tsaritsyn Street, now Small Pirogovskay Street; this is now the main building of the Moscow State Pedagogical University. In 1908 came the Anatomical Theatre, now the Russian State Medical University, the Physical Chemistry Building, now the Moscow Academy of Fine Chemical Technology. In 1915-1916, the Moscow Higher Women's Courses, sometimes called the Moscow University for Women, received the right of issuing diplomas. By 1918, the institution had 8,300 thousand students and in numbers was second only to the Moscow State University. In 1918, the University was renamed the Second Moscow State University and was called the Second Moscow University, beginning to admit men as well as women. During this period, the staff of the University included Dmitri Ivanovich Sakharov, the father of Andrei Sakharov. From 1926, the University included a Department of Yiddish Language and Literature, the primary purpose of, to train teachers for the Soviet Union's Yiddish language primary and secondary schools.
In 1927, day care nurseries for the children of students were in place, in 1928 new buildings to provide accommodation for 1,000 students were built at a cost of one million Roubles. From 1924 to 1930, the University's rector was Albert Petrovich Pinkevich, an important educationist and author of The New Education in the Soviet Republic, who became a victim of Stalin's Great Purge, "disappearing" in 1937 to a Gulag labour camp. In 1930, the Second Moscow University was divided into three separate institutions: the Second Moscow State Medical Institute (now the Russian State Medical University. By the mid-1930s the Yiddish department, now part of the Institute and headed by Meir Wiener, had become one of the world's leading centres of Yiddish scholarship. For a time, the Institute took the name of Vladimir Lenin. In 1960 it was combined with the Moscow City Pedagogical Institute. In 1967, a Western writer on Russia called the Institute "...probably the most prestigious pedagogical institute in the USSR".
Its student body numbered 10,500. The Institute regained the title of a University in 1990. In the year 1996-97, it had 12,000 students and six hundred teaching staff with the title of professor. A Bachelor's degree was awarded after four years of academic study, a teaching qualification after five years; the Seventh International Bakhtin Conference took place at the University in June, 1995. The University now has eighteen faculties and 103 departments, some 20,000 students, an active faculty of 225 professors and over nine hundred assistant professors. Seventeen staff members are full and corresponding members of the Russian Academy of Sciences and the Russian Academy of Education; the Prometei publishing house, of Moscow, sometimes spelled Prometey, is attached to the University. Joe Adamov, radio commentator Veronika Dolina, songwriter Nikolay Glazkov, poet Raisa Gorbachova, the wife of Mikhail Gorbachev Vadim G. Gratshev, paleoentomologist Hoàng Thúy Toàn, literary translator Yuliy Kim, author Alla Masevich, astronomer Albert Muchnik, mathematician Roman Personov, physicist Lev Razgon and the Memorial Society co-founder Alexey Venediktov, journalist Dmitry Vodennikov, author Lydia Pasternak Slater, chemist and translator Yuri Vizbor, bard, actor Vasily Vlasov, politician Viktor Idzio, historian Otto Schmidt and member of the Supreme Soviet of the Soviet Union Eduard Shpolsky, physicist Igor
Moscow Institute of Physics and Technology
Moscow Institute of Physics and Technology, known informally as PhysTech, is a Russian university established in Soviet Union. It prepares specialists in theoretical and applied physics, applied mathematics and related disciplines. MIPT is known for specifics of the MIPT educational process. University rankings such as The Times Higher Education Supplement are based on publications and citations. With its emphasis on embedding research in the educational process, MIPT "outsources" education and research beyond the first two or three years of study to institutions of the Russian Academy of Sciences. MIPT's own faculty is small and many of its distinguished lecturers are visiting professors from those institutions. Student research is performed outside of MIPT and research papers do not identify the authors as MIPT students; this hides MIPT from the academic radar, an effect not unwelcome during the Cold War era when leading scientists and engineers of the Soviet arms and space programs studied there.
The word "phystech," without the capital P, is used in Russian to refer to Phystech students and graduates. The main MIPT campus is located in a northern suburb of Moscow; however the Aeromechanics Department is based in a suburb south-east of Moscow. In late 1945 and early 1946, a group of prominent Soviet scientists, including in particular the future Nobel Prize winner Pyotr Kapitsa, lobbied the government for the creation of a higher educational institution radically different from the type established in the Soviet system of higher education. Applicants selected by challenging examinations and personal interviews, would be taught by and work together with, prominent scientists; each student would follow a personalized curriculum created to match his or her particular areas of interest and specialization. This system would become known as the Phystech System. In a letter to Stalin in February 1946, Kapitsa argued for the need for such a school, which he tentatively called the Moscow Institute of Physics and Technology, to better maintain and develop the country's defense potential.
The institute would follow the principles outlined above and was supposed to be governed by a board of directors of the leading research institutes of the USSR Academy of Sciences. On March 10, 1946, the government issued a decree mandating the establishment of a "College of Physics and Technology". For unknown reasons, the initial plan came to a halt in the summer of 1946; the exact circumstances are not documented, but the common assumption is that Kapitsa's refusal to participate in the atomic bomb project and his disfavor with the government and communist party that followed, cast a shadow over an independent school based on his ideas. Instead, a new government decree was issued on November 25, 1946 establishing the new school as a Department of Physics and Technology within Moscow State University. November 25 is celebrated as the date of MIPT's founding. Kapitsa foresaw that within a traditional educational institution, the new school would encounter bureaucratic obstacles, but though Kapitsa's original plan to create the new school as an independent organization did not come to fruition as envisioned, its most important principles survived intact.
The new Department enjoyed considerable autonomy within Moscow State University. Its facilities were in Dolgoprudny, away from the MSU campus, it had its own independent admissions and education system, different from the one centrally mandated for all other universities. It was headed by the MSU "vice rector for special issues"—a position created to shield the department from the University management; as Kapitsa expected, the special status of the new school with its different "rules of engagement" caused much consternation and resistance within the university. The immediate cult status that Phystech gained among talented young people, drawn by the challenge and romanticism of working on the forefront of science and technology and on projects of "government importance," many of them classified, made it an untouchable rival of every other school in the country, including MSU's own Department of Physics. At the same time, the increasing disfavor of Kapitsa with the government and anti-semitic repressions of the late 1940s made Phystech an easy target of intrigues and accusations of "elitism" and "rootless cosmopolitanism."
In the summer of 1951, the Phystech department at MSU was shut down. A group of academicians, backed by Air Force general Ivan Fedorovich Petrov, a Phystech supporter influential enough to secure Stalin's personal approval on the issue, succeeded in re-establishing Phystech as an independent institute. On September 17, 1951, a government decree re-established Phystech as the Moscow Institute of Physics and Technology. Apart from Kapitsa, other prominent scientists who taught at MIPT in the years that followed included Nobel prize winners Nikolay Semyonov, Lev Landau, Alexandr Prokhorov, Vitaly Ginzburg. MIPT alumni include Andre Geim and Konstantin Novoselov, the 2010 winners of the Nobel Prize in Physics; the following is a summary of the key principles of the Phystech System, as outlined by Kapitsa in his 1946 letter arguing for the founding of MIPT: Rigorous selection of gifted and creative young individuals. Involving leading scientists in student education, in close contact with them in their creative environment
Ukraine
Ukraine, sometimes called the Ukraine, is a country in Eastern Europe. Excluding Crimea, Ukraine has a population of about 42.5 million, making it the 32nd most populous country in the world. Its capital and largest city is Kiev. Ukrainian is the official language and its alphabet is Cyrillic; the dominant religions in the country are Greek Catholicism. Ukraine is in a territorial dispute with Russia over the Crimean Peninsula, which Russia annexed in 2014. Including Crimea, Ukraine has an area of 603,628 km2, making it the largest country within Europe and the 46th largest country in the world; the territory of modern Ukraine has been inhabited since 32,000 BC. During the Middle Ages, the area was a key centre of East Slavic culture, with the powerful state of Kievan Rus' forming the basis of Ukrainian identity. Following its fragmentation in the 13th century, the territory was contested and divided by a variety of powers, including Lithuania, Austria-Hungary, the Ottoman Empire and Russia. A Cossack republic emerged and prospered during the 17th and 18th centuries, but its territory was split between Poland and the Russian Empire, merged into the Russian-dominated Soviet Union in the late 1940s as the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic.
In 1991 Ukraine gained its independence from the Soviet Union in the aftermath of its dissolution at the end of the Cold War. Before its independence, Ukraine was referred to in English as "The Ukraine", but most sources have since moved to drop "the" from the name of Ukraine in all uses. Following its independence, Ukraine declared itself a neutral state. In 2013, after the government of President Viktor Yanukovych had decided to suspend the Ukraine-European Union Association Agreement and seek closer economic ties with Russia, a several-months-long wave of demonstrations and protests known as the Euromaidan began, which escalated into the 2014 Ukrainian revolution that led to the overthrow of Yanukovych and the establishment of a new government; these events formed the background for the annexation of Crimea by Russia in March 2014, the War in Donbass in April 2014. On 1 January 2016, Ukraine applied the economic component of the Deep and Comprehensive Free Trade Area with the European Union.
Ukraine is ranks 88th on the Human Development Index. As of 2018, Ukraine has the second lowest GDP per capita in Europe. At US$40, it has the lowest median wealth per adult in the world, it suffers from a high poverty rate and severe corruption. However, because of its extensive fertile farmlands, Ukraine is one of the world's largest grain exporters. Ukraine maintains the second-largest military in Europe after that of Russia; the country is home to a multi-ethnic population, 77.8 percent of whom are Ukrainians, followed by a large Russian minority, as well as Georgians, Belarusians, Crimean Tatars, Jews and Hungarians. Ukraine is a unitary republic under a semi-presidential system with separate powers: legislative and judicial branches; the country is a member of the United Nations, the Council of Europe, the OSCE, the GUAM organization, one of the founding states of the Commonwealth of Independent States. There are different hypotheses as to the etymology of the name Ukraine. According to the older widespread hypothesis, it means "borderland", while some more recent linguistic studies claim a different meaning: "homeland" or "region, country"."The Ukraine" used to be the usual form in English, but since the Declaration of Independence of Ukraine, "the Ukraine" has become less common in the English-speaking world, style-guides recommend not using the definite article.
"The Ukraine" now implies disregard for the country's sovereignty, according to U. S. ambassador William Taylor. The Ukrainian position is that the usage of "'The Ukraine' is incorrect both grammatically and politically." Neanderthal settlement in Ukraine is seen in the Molodova archaeological sites which include a mammoth bone dwelling. The territory is considered to be the location for the human domestication of the horse. Modern human settlement in Ukraine and its vicinity dates back to 32,000 BC, with evidence of the Gravettian culture in the Crimean Mountains. By 4,500 BC, the Neolithic Cucuteni–Trypillia culture flourished in wide areas of modern Ukraine including Trypillia and the entire Dnieper-Dniester region. During the Iron Age, the land was inhabited by Cimmerians and Sarmatians. Between 700 BC and 200 BC it was Scythia. Beginning in the sixth century BC, colonies of Ancient Greece, Ancient Rome and the Byzantine Empire, such as Tyras and Chersonesus, were founded on the northeastern shore of the Black Sea.
These colonies thrived well into the 6th century AD. The Goths stayed in the area but came under the sway of the Huns from the 370s AD. In the 7th century AD, the territory of eastern Ukraine was the centre of Old Great Bulgaria. At the end of the century, the majority of Bulgar tribes migrated in different directions, the Khazars took over much of the land. In the 5th and 6th centuries, the Antes were located in the territory of; the Antes were the ancestors of Ukrainians: White Croats, Polans, Dulebes and Tiverians. Migrations from Ukraine throughout the Balkans established many Southern Slavic nations. Northern migrations, reaching to the Ilmen l
Vitaly Ginzburg
Vitaly Lazarevich Ginzburg, ForMemRS was a Soviet and Russian theoretical physicist, Nobel laureate, a member of the Soviet and Russian Academies of Sciences and one of the fathers of the Soviet hydrogen bomb. He was the successor to Igor Tamm as head of the Department of Theoretical Physics of the Lebedev Physical Institute of the Russian Academy of Sciences, an outspoken atheist. Vitaly Ginzburg was born to a Jewish family in Moscow in 1916, the son of an engineer Lazar Yefimovich Ginzburg and a doctor Augusta Wildauer, graduated from the Physics Faculty of Moscow State University in 1938, he defended his candidate's dissertation in 1940, his doctor's dissertation in 1942. In 1944, he became a member of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union. Among his achievements are a phenomenological theory of superconductivity, the Ginzburg-Landau theory, developed with Lev Landau in 1950, he is known to biologists as being part of the group of scientists that helped bring down the reign of the politically connected anti-Mendelian agronomist Trofim Lysenko, thus allowing modern genetic science to return to the USSR.
In 1937, Ginzburg married Olga Zamsha. In 1946, he married his second wife, Nina Ginzburg, who had spent more than a year in custody on fabricated charges of plotting to assassinate the Soviet leader Joseph Stalin. Ginzburg was the editor-in-chief of the scientific journal Uspekhi Fizicheskikh Nauk, he headed the Academic Department of Physics and Astrophysics Problems, which Ginzburg founded at the Moscow Institute of Physics and Technology in 1968. Ginzburg identified as a secular Jew, following the collapse of communism in the former Soviet Union, he was active in Jewish life in Russia, where he served on the board of directors of the Russian Jewish Congress, he is well known for fighting anti-Semitism and supporting the state of Israel. In the 2000s, Ginzburg was politically active, supporting the Russian liberal opposition and human rights movement, he defended Igor Sutyagin and Valentin Danilov against charges of espionage put forth by the authorities. On 2 April 2009, in an interview to the Radio Liberty Ginzburg denounced the FSB as an institution harmful to Russia and the ongoing expansion of its authority as a return to Stalinism.
Ginzburg worked at the P. N. Lebedev Physical Institute of Soviet and Russian Academy of Sciences in Moscow since 1940. Russian Academy of Sciences is a major institution where all Nobel Prize laureates of physics from Russia have done their studies and/or research works. Ginzburg was an avowed atheist, both under the militantly atheist Soviet government and in post-Communist Russia when religion made a strong revival, he criticized clericalism in the press and wrote several books devoted to the questions of religion and atheism. Because of this, some Orthodox Christian groups denounced him and said no science award could excuse his verbal attacks on the Russian Orthodox Church, he was one of the signers of the Open letter to the President Vladimir V. Putin from the Members of the Russian Academy of Sciences against clericalisation of Russia. A spokeswoman for the Russian Academy of Sciences, announced that Ginzburg died in Moscow on 8 November 2009 from cardiac arrest, he had been suffering from ill health for several years, three years before his death said "In general, I envy believers.
I am 90, being overcome by illnesses. For believers, it is easier to deal with life's other hardships, but what can be done? I cannot believe in resurrection after death."Prime Minister of Russia Vladimir Putin sent his condolences to Ginzburg's family, saying "We bid farewell to an extraordinary personality whose outstanding talent, exceptional strength of character and firmness of convictions evoked true respect from his colleagues". President of Russia Dmitry Medvedev, in his letter of condolences, described Ginzburg as a "top physicist of our time whose discoveries had a huge impact on the development of national and world science."Ginzburg was buried on 11 November in the Novodevichy Cemetery in Moscow, the resting place of many famous politicians and scientists of Russia. Vitaly L. Ginzburg, Autobiography in English at Nobelprize.org Ginzburg's homepage Curriculum Vitae Open letter to the President of the Russian Federation Vladimir V. Putin Obituary The Daily Telegraph 11 Nov 2009. Obituary The Independent November 14, 2009.
Biography Obituary
listen); 8 July 1895 – 12 April 1971) was a Soviet physicist who received the 1958 Nobel Prize in Physics, jointly with Pavel Alekseyevich Cherenkov and Ilya Mikhailovich Frank, for their 1934 discovery of Cherenkov radiation.
