On Superconductivity and Superfluidity: A Scientific Autobiography , Vitaly L. Ginzburg Springer, Berlin, 2009. $64.95 (232 pp.). ISBN 978-3-540-68004-8
I received the sad news in November that Vitaly Ginzburg, a giant of 20th-century physics, had died.
Ginzburg’s final book, On Superconductivity and Superfluidity: A Scientific Autobiography, contains his 2003 Physics Nobel Prize lecture, his views on contemporary scientific and political issues, and his contributions to physics, particularly to his two favorite fields, mentioned in the book’s title. His versatility was striking: He made fundamental contributions to such diverse fields as phase-transition theory and applications, ferroelectricity, atmospheric electromagnetic-wave propagation, radio astronomy, and astrophysics. He was also one of the creators of the Soviet hydrogen bomb.
Ginzburg started working on superconductivity when it was still a riddle with few clues. Thus, the famous Ginzburg–Landau theory of 1950 was a brilliant display of physical intuition and insight. It introduced both the wavefunction for the superconducting carriers—identified eight years later as Cooper pairs—and the quantum coherence length. The Ginzburg–Landau equation is a mainstay of theoretical physics and its time-dependent generalization governs the propagation of optical solitons in fiber optics.
As On Superconductivity and Superfluidity illustrates, Ginzburg’s main scientific strength was a direct approach that used a minimum of mathematics. For example, he recounts the suggestion he made to Lev Landau that the wavefunction can serve as an order parameter for superconductivity (page 44). And in describing the Levanyuk–Ginzburg criterion (pages 54 and 193), he uses simple mean-field theory to validate the mean-field approximation in the theory of phase transitions and to estimate the phase-transition fluctuation amplitude; the proof, which led to the observation of strong fluctuations in the vicinity of second-order phase transitions, resolved the apparent contradiction between Landau’s theory and Lars Onsager’s exact solution of the two-dimensional Ising model. The book ends with a bibliometric study by Manuel Cardona and Werner Marx from which I drew one conclusion: Ginzburg’s papers are much cited.
The general public will find Ginzburg’s personal views interesting: Among other things, he discusses his relationship with his mentors Landau and Igor Tamm, and he opines on the Arab–Israeli conflict. But the book is intended for people with a physical-science or mathematical education. The science is explained simply enough that engineers and scientists outside Ginzburg’s fields of expertise will understand it. Nonetheless, the construction of the text is somewhat loose and the book contains many repetitions. Also, many annoying misprints appear in the English translation from the Soviet Journal of Experimental and Theoretical Physics of the famous 1950 Ginzburg–Landau article. But the book compensates with translations of Ginzburg’s texts that convey his characteristic energy, passion, and sincerity.
On Superconductivity and Superfluidity complements Philip Anderson’s scientific autobiography, A Career in Theoretical Physics (World Scientific, 1994), which also addresses the theory of superconductivity. Ginzburg focuses on basic questions regarding the nature of the order parameter and its coupling with the electromagnetic field, whereas Anderson is more concerned with the completeness of the Bardeen-Cooper-Schrieffer theory. In other respects the two books differ even more. Anderson’s does not contain biography. Rather, it is mostly a collection of his papers, supplemented by comments. Although personal opinions and preferences can be seen in those comments, Anderson’s work is much more restrained than Ginzburg’s more open autobiography.
Russian American poet Iosif Brodsky once said that Russians deserve a place in heaven merely because they were born in Russia! That’s a fitting statement for Ginzburg, who was born to a Jewish family and whose career and even life were in grave danger on several occasions during World War II and during Joseph Stalin’s anti-Semitic campaign. Ginzburg’s world-view was a striking and endearing mix of deep insight and naiveté. Once under the delusion that it was his social duty to create nuclear arms for the Soviet government, he later acknowledged that he failed to perceive the criminal nature of the Communist regime until the end of Stalin’s rule. It is surprising the revelation came so late, given that both his colleague Landau and his second wife, Nina Yermakova, were incarcerated under Stalin’s regime—Nina spent a year in prison for the fabricated charge of conspiring to assassinate Stalin. Ginzburg, who wed Nina while she was in exile after her imprisonment, was himself a victim of political persecution.
In his daily life Ginzburg acted with decency and courage. As head of the theoretical division at the Russian Academy of Sciences’ P. N. Lebedev Physical Institute, he kept the nuclear physicist, dissident, and 1975 Nobel laureate Andrei Sakharov employed during his exile in the 1980s. More recently, after his book was written, Ginzburg wrote letters to Russian president Vladimir Putin requesting that he release several Russian scientists jailed on bogus espionage convictions. And at age 93, Ginzburg, an avowed atheist, was still fighting attempts by the Russian Orthodox Church to penetrate into educational and military systems; for that activity the church fathers had been calling for his deportation.
Ginzburg had repeatedly stated that his career was driven by chance. We should all be grateful for the chance event of the KGB’s denying Ginzburg access to classified documents, including his own reports, which caused him to switch from nuclear physics to superconductivity. His subsequent success earned him significant influence in the Russian scientific community: He led a famous scientific seminar that for 40 years attracted both experimentalists and theorists of diverse specializations. Ginzburg’s dedication to science and his energy, sincerity, and benevolence make him a fine model for both young and seasoned scientists.
Valery Pokrovsky is a Distinguished Professor of Physics at Texas A&M University in College Station. He conducts research in quantum mechanics, statistical physics, and condensed-matter theory, and is a member of the L. D. Landau Institute for Theoretical Physics in Chernogolovka, Russia.
