Dr. Ivar Giaever, co-recipient of the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1973.
I generally try to note Nobel Prize recipients, especially the physics ones. But Dr. Giaever’s obit stands out to me for two reasons:
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.
As a reformed “D” student, “D” students for the win, baby!
Dr. Giaever’s work was in quantum tunneling.
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.
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.)
His co-recipients of the 1973 Nobel Prize were Dr. Esaki and Dr. Brian D. Josephson.
The other thing that stood out to me:
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.
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.”
I hate to look like a Luddite or something, but I am what some call a climate change denier. Sure I have read a lot of the so called scientific literature that presumes to prove that climate change is real. But like the recently deceased Dr. Giaever, I think that the ability of the scientific community to measure the actual exact temperature to the 0.1degree Celsius way back in the early 1800’s is simply an improbable if not impossible thing to do.
I am reminded of the discovery of the actual cause of peptic ulcers, that being the H. Pylori bacteria. Barry Marshall and Robin Warren both were involved in the discovery, and both faced criticism and ridicule over their discovery. The majority if not the entirety of the “scientific community” made no bones about the fact that they thought the two men were quacks who simply didn’t understand science and the human body.
Funny then how when they finally were forced to admit that the two were right, they suddenly forgot how they made fun of the two men a few years before.
While I am an old man, I still remember learning about the scientific theory and how it works, including a control and an open mind, as well as not having a preconceived notion of what the results would be. With the current theory of climate change, not only can’t they reproduce results from one test to another, but any questions involving the veracity of the results is met with not just scorn, but with heated anger.