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Ivar Giaever | |
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 Giaever in 2005 | |
| Born | Ivar Giæver April 5, 1929 |
| Died | June 20, 2025 (aged 96) Schenectady, New York, U.S. |
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| Alma mater | |
| Known for | Discovering tunnelling in superconductors (1960) |
| Spouse | Inger Skramstad (m. 1952; died 2023) |
| Children | 4 |
| Awards |
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| Scientific career | |
| Fields | |
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Ivar Giaever (/ˈjeɪvər/ YAY-ver;[1] Norwegian: [ˈîːvɑr ˈjæːvər]; April 5, 1929 – June 20, 2025) was a Norwegian-American physicist and engineer who shared the 1973 Nobel Prize in Physics with Leo Esaki and Brian Josephson. One half of the prize was awarded jointly to Esaki and Giaever "for their experimental discoveries regarding tunneling phenomena in semiconductors and superconductors, respectively".[2]
Education and career
Giaever earned a degree in mechanical engineering from the Norwegian Institute of Technology in Trondheim in 1952. In 1954, he emigrated from Norway to Canada, where he was employed by the Canadian division of General Electric. He moved to the United States four years later, joining General Electric's Corporate Research and Development Center in Schenectady, New York, in 1958. He lived in Niskayuna, New York, since then, taking up US citizenship in 1964. While working for General Electric, Giaever earned a Ph.D. degree at the Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in 1964. In 1988, he left General Electric to become a professor at the Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute. He also became a professor at the University of Oslo, sponsored by Statoil.[3]
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 through a Guggenheim Fellowship. He continued to work in this area after he returned to the US, founding the company Applied BioPhysics, Inc. in 1993.[3][4]
The Nobel Prize
The work that led to Giaever's Nobel Prize was performed at General Electric in 1960. Following on Esaki's discovery of electron tunnelling in semiconductors in 1958, Giaever showed that tunnelling also took place in superconductors, demonstrating tunnelling through a very thin layer of oxide surrounded on both sides by metal in a superconducting or normal state.[5] Giaever's 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.[6] Giaever's experimental demonstration of tunnelling 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.[7]
He had co-signed a letter from over 70 Nobel laureate scientists to the Louisiana State Legislature supporting the repeal of the Louisiana Science Education Act.[8]
Other prizes
In addition to the Nobel Prize, Giaever was also awarded the Oliver E. Buckley Prize by the American Physical Society in 1965, the Golden Plate Award by the American Academy of Achievement in 1966,[9] and the Zworykin Award by the National Academy of Engineering in 1974.[10]
In 1985, he was awarded an honorary degree, doctor honoris causa, at the Norwegian Institute of Technology, later part of Norwegian University of Science and Technology.[11]
He was a member of the Norwegian Academy of Science and Letters.[12]
Global warming
Giaever was a climate change denier, who has fueled doubt on climate change,[13] for example calling it a "new religion". However, he had presented no strong evidence to support this position.[14] On 13 September 2011, he resigned from the American Physical Society after the organization called the evidence of damaging global warming "incontrovertible".[15]
Giaever was a science advisor with American conservative and libertarian think tank The Heartland Institute.[16]
Personal life and death
Giaever was married to his childhood sweetheart Inger (née Skramstad) from 1952 until her death on September 12, 2023, at the age of 94.[17] They had four children.
Giaever was an atheist.[18]
Giaever died on June 20, 2025, at the age of 96.[19]
Selected publications
- Giaever, Ivar (1960). "Energy Gap in Superconductors Measured by Electron Tunneling". Physical Review Letters. 5 (4): 147. Bibcode:1960PhRvL...5..147G. doi:10.1103/PhysRevLett.5.147.
- Giaever, Ivar (1960). "Electron Tunneling Between Two Superconductors". Physical Review Letters. 5 (10): 464. Bibcode:1960PhRvL...5..464G. doi:10.1103/PhysRevLett.5.464.
- Giaever, Ivar (1974). "Electron tunneling and superconductivity". Reviews of Modern Physics. 46 (2): 245. Bibcode:1974RvMP...46..245G. doi:10.1103/RevModPhys.46.245.
- Giaever, Ivar (2016). "I Am The Smartest Man I Know": A Nobel Laureate's Difficult Journey, World Scientific. ISBN 978-981-3109-17-9.
References
- "GIAEVER Definition and Meaning". Dictionary.com.
- "The Nobel Prize in Physics 1973". Nobelprize.org. The Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences. June 27, 2011. Archived from the original on June 21, 2011. Retrieved June 27, 2011.
The Nobel Prize in Physics 1973 was divided, one half jointly to Leo Esaki and Ivar Giaever "for their experimental discoveries regarding tunneling phenomena in semiconductors and superconductors, respectively" and the other half to Brian David Josephson "for his theoretical predictions of the properties of a supercurrent through a tunnel barrier, in particular those phenomena which are generally known as the Josephson effects".
- Lundqvist, Stig (1992). "Biography". Nobelprize.org, Bio from Nobel Lectures, Physics 1971-1980, Editor Stig Lundqvist, World Scientific Publishing Co., Singapore, 1992. The Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences and World Scientific. Archived from the original on December 14, 2010. Retrieved June 27, 2011.
- "Giaever, Ivar - Niels Bohr Library & Archives". history.aip.org. American Institute of Physics.
- Giaever, I. (1960). "Energy Gap in Superconductors Measured by Electron Tunneling". Physical Review Letters. 5 (4): 147–148. Bibcode:1960PhRvL...5..147G. doi:10.1103/PhysRevLett.5.147.
- Bardeen, Cooper, and Schrieffer won the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1972 for this theoretical advance, which bears their initials.
- "Press Release: The 1973 Nobel Prize in Physics". Nobelprize.org. 27 June 2011. The Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences. October 23, 1973. Archived from the original on May 17, 2011. Retrieved June 27, 2011.
The Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences has decided to award the 1973 Nobel Prize in Physics to Leo Esaki, USA, Ivar Giaever, USA and Brian D Josephson, UK. The award is for their discoveries regarding tunneling phenomena in solids
- "Nobel Laureate Letter". Archived from the original on October 18, 2020. Retrieved January 15, 2012.
- "Golden Plate Awardees of the American Academy of Achievement". www.achievement.org. American Academy of Achievement.
- Giaever, Ivar (June 27, 2011). "Ivar Giaever Physics Department Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute". rpi.edu. Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute. Archived from the original on December 10, 2011. Retrieved June 27, 2011.
Positions Institute Professor, School of Engineering and School of Science Professor at large, University of Oslo, Norway President Applied BioPhysics, Inc., 1223 Peoples Ave, Troy, NY 12180 … Major Prizes: Oliver E. Buckley Prize 1965 Nobel Prize 1973 Zworkin Award 1974
- "Honorary doctors at NTNU". Norwegian University of Science and Technology.
- "Gruppe 8: Teknologiske fag" (in Norwegian). Norwegian Academy of Science and Letters. Archived from the original on September 27, 2011. Retrieved October 7, 2010.
- Jeffrey D. Corbin, Miriam E. Katz: Effective strategies to counter campus presentations on climate denial. Eos. 93, 27, 2012, doi:10.1029/2012EO270007
- Strassel, Kimberley A. (June 26, 2009). "The Climate Change Climate Change The number of skeptics is swelling everywhere". wsj.com. The Wall Street Journal. Archived from the original on July 4, 2011. Retrieved June 26, 2011.
Dr. Kiminori Itoh, a Japanese environmental physical chemist who contributed to a U.N. climate report, dubs man-made warming "the worst scientific scandal in history." Norway's Ivar Giaever, Nobel Prize winner for physics, decries it as the "new religion."
- War of words over global warming as Nobel laureate resigns in protest. The Telegraph. September, 25, 2011.
- "Ivar Giaever Profile". The Heartland Institute. May 31, 2016. Retrieved June 9, 2017.
- "Inger Giaever Obituary". Legacy.com. The Daily Gazette. September 24, 2023. Retrieved May 19, 2024.
- Giaever, Ivar (November 2016). "I Am The Smartest Man I Know": A Nobel Laureate's Difficult Journey. World Scientific. ISBN 978-981-3109-17-9.
- "Nobel Prize winner Ivar Giæver has died". vg.no (in Norwegian). July 3, 2025. Retrieved July 3, 2025.
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Ivar Giaever, Nobel Winner in Quantum Physics, Dies at 96
A former “D” student from Norway, he made his mark at G.E.’s Research Lab in the U.S., in part by confirming a pivotal theory about superconductivity.
Ivar Giaever might not have won the Nobel Prize in Physics if a job recruiter at General Electric had known the difference between the educational grading systems of the United States and Norway.
It was 1956, and he was applying for a position at the General Electric Research Laboratory in Schenectady, N.Y. The interviewer looked at his grades, from the Norwegian Institute of Technology in Trondheim, where Dr. Giaever (pronounced JAY-ver) had studied mechanical engineering, and was impressed: The young applicant had scored 4.0 marks in math and physics. The recruiter congratulated him.
But what the recruiter didn’t know was that in Norway, the best grade was a 1.0, not a 4.0, the top grade in American schools. In fact, a 4.0 in Norway was barely passing — something like a D on American report cards. In reality, his academic record in Norway had been anything but impressive.
He did not want to be dishonest, Dr. Giaever would say in recounting the episode with some amusement over the years, but he also did not correct the interviewer. He got the job.
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He proceeded to spend the next 32 years at the laboratory, along the way developing an experiment that provided proof of a central idea in quantum physics — that subatomic particles can behave like powerful waves.
The experiment, using superconductors — material that is able to convey electricity without resistance so that a current running through it will never dissipate — also confirmed a game-changing theory about superconductivity.
For his work, Dr. Giaever shared the Nobel Prize in 1973.
He died on June 20 at a nursing home in Schenectady, his daughter Anne Giaever said on Monday. He was 96.
Though Dr. Giaever later earned a doctorate in theoretical physics, in 1964, from Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in Troy, N.Y., he had not yet completed that degree when he came up with the experiment that would earn him his share of the Nobel. Indeed, as he admitted in his Nobel lecture, he did not fully understand the ideas behind the experiment when he first started working on it: He was a mechanical engineer, steeped in how things work in classical physics, which deals with real-world objects, while quantum physics predicts what happens in the weird subatomic world.
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One of those weird things is the duality at the heart of quantum physics — namely, how particles, like electrons that orbit the nuclei of atoms, can also behave like waves. Based on this proposition, electrons can, in certain circumstances, “tunnel” through what otherwise is an impermeable barrier. Imagine a tennis ball bouncing off a wall a few times before it suddenly passes through the wall without leaving a trace.
The concept of tunneling had been predicted in the 1920s. In 1957, Leo Esaki, a scientist working at Sony in Japan, produced the first example of tunneling while experimenting with semiconductors, components that can conduct electricity with no resistance or loss of current. Dr. Esaki invented the tunnel diode, a type of semiconductor that is used in oscillators and amplifiers, among other devices.
Dr. Giaever later admitted that he had not been familiar with Dr. Esaki’s work and did not really understand it at first. But G.E.’s Research Lab employed more than 800 scientists, and it was at the suggestion of a colleague that he started working on tunneling experiments, using thin strips of metal separated by insulating layers.
In his classes at Rensselaer, he learned about a new theory of superconductors put forward by John Bardeen, Leon Cooper and John Robert Schrieffer — an idea named B.C.S. after the three scientists’ initials.
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Back at the lab, he decided to create a tunneling experiment using superconductors. He created a sample of two strips of lead separated by a very thin strip of lead oxide. He then immersed the sample in liquid helium attached to an electric current detector and began doing the same type of tunneling experiments that he had done on the other strips of metal.
At first, he failed, because the lead oxide was too thick. Finally, on April 22, 1960, the experiment succeeded, and the results conformed to the predictions of the B.C.S. theory. (Dr. Bardeen, Dr. Cooper and Dr. Schrieffer shared the 1972 Nobel in Physics for their theory, helped by Dr. Giaever’s proof.)
Dr. Giaever said that afterward, a laboratory colleague went up and down the hallways in excitement, spreading the news of the breakthrough.
Dr. Giaever shared the 1973 Nobel with Dr. Esaki and Brian David Josephson, a British physicist whose theoretical work predicted and explained some of the most important aspects of tunneling, including that it can produce a current across superconductors even when no voltage is applied to a circuit.
Dr. Giaever prided himself on his common-sense approach to science, but not all his ideas were welcomed by his peers. He became a prominent denier of climate change, referring to the science around it as a “new religion.” (“I would say that, basically, global warming is a nonproblem,” he said in a 2015 speech.) He based his opposition, in part, on his belief that it is impossible to track changes in the Earth’s temperature and that, even if it could be done, the temperature changes would be insignificant.
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When the American Physical Society announced in 2011 that the evidence for climate change and global warming was incontrovertible, he resigned from the society in disgust, saying: “‘Incontrovertible’ is not a scientific word. Nothing is incontrovertible in science.”
Ivar Giaever was born on April 5, 1929, in Bergen, Norway, a city on the country’s southwestern coast. He was the second child of John and Gudrun (Skaarud) Giaever. His father was a pharmacist. Neither of his parents had a university education, but they liked to read, and their house was always filled with books, he recalled.
The family moved to a farm when Ivar was 5. He went to a public school that had only three teachers, and his class could meet only twice a week, he wrote in a 2016 autobiography, “I Am the Smartest Man I Know,” a tongue-in-cheek recollection of his life.
When he was 13, he met Inger Skramstad. They began dating when he was 14 and married in 1952. She died in 2023. In addition to his daughter Anne, he is survived by three other children, John, Guri and Trine, as well as seven grandchildren and one great-grandson. A granddaughter died in 2019.
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Dr. Giaever graduated from the Norwegian Institute of Technology in 1952 with a degree in mechanical engineering, despite his poor grades. After a year of service in the Norwegian Army, he moved to Oslo, where he had been hired by the government as a patent engineer. His wife and their new baby were unable to join him because he did not have a big enough apartment, and when he applied to the government for a bigger one, he was told that there was an eight-year waiting list. He decided to leave the country for better opportunities.
In 1954, he and his family emigrated to Canada, where he found a job with Canadian General Electric, based in Toronto, and enrolled in an advanced training program in physics and math that the company offered. It was the first time he truly applied himself to his studies, he said.
He and his family moved to the United States in 1956, when he got the job at G.E.’s lab in Schenectady, and he eventually became a naturalized citizen. He left G.E. in the late 1980s, becoming a physics professor at Rensselaer. He was a visiting professor at the University of Oslo, which renamed a research laboratory after him.
At General Electric, Dr. Giaever also did biophysics research, working on sensing technology that could monitor living animal cells in vitro. With Charles R. Keese, a former G.E. colleague, he started Applied BioPhysics, a company in Troy that uses the sensing technology.
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Dr. Giaever enjoyed being a scientist, he said, gratified that he could be paid for doing research. He particularly liked doing experiments, even when they did not succeed.
“To me, the greatest moment in an experiment is always just before I learn whether the particular idea is a good or a bad one,” he said in his Nobel lecture. “Thus, even a failure is exciting, and most of my ideas have, of course, been wrong.”
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