About Science, Myself and Others

  • V. L. Ginzburg
Institute of Physics/Taylor & Francis: 2004. 549 pp. $99.95 | ISBN: 0-750-30992-X

Vitali Ginzburg, winner of the 2003 Nobel Prize for physics, was born in Moscow in 1916. He has survived, through intellect, character and chance, through the whole tempestuous and tragic period of the Soviet Union. He experienced two world wars, a revolution, leninism, stalinism, the fall of the Soviet Union, and the chaotic present-day reconstruction of Russia at the hands of ‘gangster capitalism’.

About Science, Myself and Others deals with some immense topics: the circumstances of the Soviet Union, the history of branches of fundamental physics, and the lives of distinguished physicists, especially Lev Landau. In particular, Ginzburg focuses on struggles in three main areas: fundamental physics, the mechanics of daily life, and the ideologies of politics and religion.

Since the rise of Mikhail Gorbachev in 1985, Ginzburg has produced various accounts of his life and work, biographical sketches of his contemporaries, and more general pieces. About Science, Myself and Others is an English translation of the latest Russian edition, from 2003, which brought together scattered material but with some repetition and no index. It also contains material based on chapters published in his earlier book The Physics of a Lifetime (Springer, 2001), and includes its contents list. The new collection contains a mass of detailed information on physics and on people, making it indispensable, particularly to those interested in the school of Landau and his fellow Nobel laureate Igor Tamm.

Ginzburg writes his apologia pro vita sua not as an apology but with a (justified) “fair conceit of himself” for posterity as his “version of the facts”. He makes little concession to the ignorant and suggests a simple test of general knowledge for politicians and others. For example: “Q. What causes the seasons? A. The inclination of the axis of the Earth to the plane of its orbit.” He writes that he has found interviews unsatisfactory, and in one paper he even wrote both the questions and his answers.

Most people have sought “to render unto Caesar what is Caesar's and to God what is God's”, with a boundary between their inner beliefs and the society in which they live. But Ginzburg has always had an intense concern not just for physics but for the welfare of Russia. In 1989, during the Gorbachev era, he even became a deputy in the Supreme Soviet (the parliament), representing the Soviet Academy of Sciences, but left politics in 1991. In recent years he has been “an incorrigible atheist”, and campaigned against the revival of the Orthodox Church and pseudoscience of all kinds.

Vitali Ginzburg looks back on the science that flourished amid the political turbulence in Russia. Credit: T. MAKEYEVA/AFP/GETTY

Ginzburg never suffered personal repression from the authorities, and in fact was honoured by the state, primarily for his work on the nuclear-weapons programme. He made a key contribution to the physics of the hydrogen bomb, proposing the use of lithium-6 deuteride as a nuclear source — a suggestion that surprised the Americans and brought him, in late 1953, the Order of Lenin and the Stalin prize first class. He might otherwise have suffered repression from the state following his marriage to Nina Ermakova, who had been exiled to Gorki and whose father was falsely regarded as an enemy of the state.

If history is a line with branch points at arbitrary decisions, then the whole manifold of all possible trajectories might be viewed as a tree. If this is the history of Russia, what shape is this tree of all possible paths? How different could it have been? The science theoretician Arnosht Kolman entitled his autobiography of disillusionment Our Lives Should Have Been Different (1982). How would Nikolai Bukharin, for example, have dealt with the situation if he, instead of Stalin, had succeeded Lenin?

Karl Marx hoped to discover laws and regularities in human history, as did the ‘general systems’ movement from Bertalanffy to Peter Turchin today, but the practical results have been slight. Ginzburg points to the key branch point: “I believe that the fundamental and principal cause of all these disasters is the Bolshevist–Communist totalitarian regime which was set up in Russia as a result of the coup d'état in October 1917,” which followed the February 1917 revolution that deposed the tsar.

The first part of the book is a detailed review of the physics that concerned Ginzburg, including radiation from uniformly moving sources (the Vavilov–Cherenkov effect), cosmic rays, soft modes, superconductivity and superfluidity. It manages to place his own work in a historical framework.

The second part of the book deals with history and includes biographical memoirs of several of his contemporaries, notably Landau, Tamm and Evgeni Lifshitz, but also Sergei Ivanovich Vavilov (brother of the geneticist Nikolai Vavilov and former president of the Soviet Academy of Sciences), as well as an autobiography. There is also an analysis of Russia's relationship with the Nobel prize, particularly in connection with C. V. Raman's prize for Raman scattering and the parallel work of G. S. Landsberg and L. I. Mandelstam, and with the discovery of the Vavilov–Cherenkov effect. Finally, there is a collection of Ginzburg's publications on social and political questions, written with great factual detail and strong feeling.

In short, Ginzburg presents himself and his work, for the record, in the wider world of physics and of Russia.