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.
He proceeded to spend the next 32 years at the laboratory, along the way developing an experiment using superconductors that provided proof of a central idea in quantum physics — that subatomic particles can behave like powerful waves — confirming 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.
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, materials 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.)
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.
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.
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.
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.”
Ash Wu contributed reporting.
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