伊瓦尔·贾埃弗1929—2025

生平

出生于挪威卑尔根，他在通用电气研究的时候，用实验证明了超导体的能带，验证了超导体BCS理论。因此，他与江崎玲于奈、布赖恩·约瑟夫森同获1973年诺贝尔物理学奖。

贾埃弗后来的工作集中在生物物理学。他晚年认为“全球变暖议题”不是科学事实，已经变成了一种宗教。为此，他辞去了在美国物理学会的职位。

Ivar Giaever (April 5, 1929 – June 20, 2025) was a Norwegian–American physicist who shared the 1973 Nobel Prize in Physics with Leo Esaki and Brian Josephson. One half of the prize was jointly awarded to Esaki and Giaever "for their experimental discoveries regarding tunneling phenomena in semiconductors and superconductors, respectively."

Biography

Ivar Giaever was born on April 5, 1929, in Bergen, Norway, the second of three children of John A. Giaever, a pharmacist. He grew up in Toten, where he attended elementary school, before moving to Hamar to receive his secondary education. From 1948 to 1952, Giaever studied mechanical engineering at the Norwegian Institute of Technology (now the Norwegian University of Science and Technology), graduating with a Master of Science in Technology. In 1953, he completed his military service in the Norwegian Army, before going on to work for the Norwegian Patent Office as a patent examiner.

In 1954, Giaever joined the Advanced Engineering Program of Canadian General Electric. He then immigrated to the United States in 1956, joining the General Electric Research Laboratory in 1958. While working for General Electric, Giaever pursued doctoral studies at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute (RPI), where he obtained a Doctor of Philosophy in Theoretical Physics in 1964. In 1988, he left General Electric to become an Institute Professor at RPI. The same year, he also became a professor at the University of Oslo, sponsored by Statoil.

Giaever died on June 20, 2025, in Schenectady, New York, at the age of 96. He is buried in the cemetery of Hoff Church in Østre Toten, Norway.

Research

From 1958 to 1969, Giaever worked on thin films, tunneling, and superconductivity. In 1960, following from Leo Esaki's discovery of tunneling in semiconductors in 1957, Giaever showed that tunneling also took place in superconductors, demonstrating tunneling through a very thin layer of oxide surrounded on both sides by metal in a superconducting or normal state. His experiments demonstrated the existence of an energy gap in superconductors, one of the most important predictions of the BCS theory of superconductivity, which had been developed in 1957. Giaever's experimental demonstration of tunneling in superconductors stimulated the theoretical physicist Brian Josephson to work on the phenomenon, leading to his prediction of the Josephson effect in 1962. Esaki and Giaever shared half of the 1973 Nobel Prize in Physics, and Josephson received the other half.

Giaever's research later in his career was mainly in the field of biophysics. In 1969, he studied biophysics for a year at the University of Cambridge in England, through a Guggenheim Fellowship. He continued to work in this area after he returned to the United States in 1970, founding the company Applied BioPhysics, Inc., in 1993.

Activism

Giaever was a climate change denier, who fueled doubt on climate change, for example calling it a "new religion." However, he had presented no strong evidence to support this position. On September 13, 2011, he resigned from the American Physical Society, after the organization called the evidence of damaging global warming "incontrovertible."

Giaever was a science advisor to the Heartland Institute, an American conservative and libertarian think tank that denies climate change.

Giaever co-signed a letter from over 70 Nobel laureate scientists to the Louisiana State Legislature supporting the repeal of the anti-evolution Louisiana Science Education Act.

Personal life

In 1952, Giaever married his childhood sweetheart, Inger Skramstad, who died on September 12, 2023, at the age of 94. They had four children.

In 1964, Giaever became a naturalized U.S. citizen.

Giaever was an atheist.