Posted on Tue, Nov. 10, 2009
MOSCOW - Vitaly Ginzburg, 93, a Nobel Prize-winning Russian physicist and one of the fathers of the Soviet hydrogen bomb, died of cardiac arrest Sunday in Moscow.
Mr. Ginzburg won the 2003 Nobel Prize in physics with two other scientists for their contribution to theories on superconductivity, the ability of some materials to conduct electricity without resistance.
In the late 1940s and early 1950s, he was a key member of the group that developed the Soviet hydrogen bomb. Mr. Ginzburg wrote that he and Andrei Sakharov, considered the father of the Soviet H-bomb, formulated the two ideas that made it possible to build the thermonuclear device.
In a career that spanned seven decades, Mr. Ginzburg wrote several groundbreaking studies in various fields - such as quantum theory, astrophysics, radio-astronomy, and diffusion of cosmic radiation in Earth's atmosphere - that were of "Nobel Prize caliber," said Gennady Mesyats, director of the Lebedev Physics Institute in Moscow, where Mr. Ginzburg worked.
Russian President Dmitry A. Medvedev praised Mr. Ginzburg as a "top physicist of our time whose discoveries had a huge impact on the development of national and world science" in a letter of condolences released by the Kremlin.
Mr. Ginzburg was born into a Jewish family in 1916, a year before the Bolshevik Revolution, and grew up in times of economic degradation and hunger. His career began in the late 1930s, a time of Stalinist purges and pervasive anti-Semitism. He was blacklisted and faced persecution but "was saved by the hydrogen bomb," he wrote in the autobiography for his Nobel Prize.
A vehement atheist, Mr. Ginzburg strongly opposed the growing role of the Russian Orthodox Church in state affairs after the 1991 Soviet collapse, protesting its attempts to have a say in political and secular matters and introduce religious lessons in schools. "By teaching religion in schools, these Orthodox scoundrels want to lure away children's souls," he told a Russian newspaper in 2007.
Despite his age, he remained active as a scientist and public figure. He also was a staunch believer in the global triumph of democracy.
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