Vitaly Ginzburg, who has died aged 93, was a Nobel prizewinning Russian physicist and a father of the Soviet hydrogen bomb. He was born in Tsarist Russia so long ago that even the calendar was different: his date of birth was 21 September 1916, according to the old Russian calendar, or 4 October in the western version.
The discovery of superconductivity – the ability of electric currents to flow in certain materials for years without resistance, whose theoretical explanation would lead to his Nobel prize – had occurred five years before his birth. Its mechanism remained a mystery for 40 years, until Ginzburg and Lev Landau produced their theory in 1950. With the phenomenon having defied explanation for so long, the Nobel committee seemed in no rush to recognise their success, and another half-century elapsed before Ginzburg shared the 2003 prize (with his fellow Russian Alexei Abrikosov and the Briton Anthony Leggett, Landau having died in 1968).
It is customary for Nobel laureates to produce a brief autobiography, which usually amounts to a few hundred words. Ginzburg's was different. Having lived through so much – born in pre-revolutionary Russia, maturing in Stalin's Soviet Union, and spending his latter years in the new Russia – he had a broad vision, rich experiences and much to say. The result was an epic, exceeding 14,000 words, the reason being that: "I am already 87 and will hardly ever have another occasion to write about myself and my views."
A member of a Jewish family, the son of an engineer and a doctor, he had lived through times of economic degradation, and hunger. One of his memories from early childhood was of "a wagon, loaded with half-covered coffins with dead bodies and pulled by a horse past our house in the centre of Moscow". He did not start school until the age of 11, as it was not obligatory and his parents were concerned at the state of Soviet schools. Four years after he eventually entered formal education, his school was abolished, leaving him "lost and unhappy". By chance, an acquaintance of his aunt was a professor of science in a higher educational establishment, and he helped get Ginzburg a job as a laboratory assistant. Ginzburg recalled: "I did not have any talent, but in physics I was at least interested."
He progressed rapidly, entering Moscow State University, graduating in 1938, receiving his PhD in physics in 1940 and DSc in 1942. In 1937 he had married a fellow student, Olga Zamsha, from whom he divorced in 1946, the same year that he married Nina Ermakova. In 1944 Nina had been arrested, allegedly for being part of a plot to kill Stalin. She was released in an amnesty the following year, but exiled to Gorky. Ginzburg was at that stage teaching in Gorky University, which is where they met.
From 1946 to 1953 Ginzburg was living in Moscow, but his requests for Nina to be released from exile to join him were refused. In turn, the paranoia of the Stalinist tyranny determined that he, as her husband, was "politically unreliable". So it is remarkable that, in 1950, Ginzburg was recruited to the team developing the Soviet hydrogen bomb.
Only after the story of the Soviet weapons programme was declassified did the importance of Ginzburg's contributions become known. Before those times the folk wisdom was that Andrei Sakharov had made, enigmatically, "the first idea", and Ginzburg "the second idea", which had opened the way to the H-bomb. The essential fuel is tritium, an isotope of hydrogen, which is a gas. However, a gas is hard to control in hydrogen bombs, and Ginzburg's insight was that it could be made, within the device, by bombarding solid lithium deuteride with neutrons.
Crucial though this idea had been, concerns about Ginzburg's "reliability" led to him being excluded from the weapon's actual test, and in 1951, during one of Stalin's antisemitic purges, he was removed from the project entirely. He feared that he was about to be put into a special prison for scientists, but was saved from this fate by Stalin's death in 1953. At this, Ginzburg was reinstated into the project, and also became a member of the Russian Academy of Sciences.
At the same time that he was involved with the secret weapons programme, he was also working in fundamental pure research, producing his famed paper with Landau on the phenomenon of superconductivity in 1950.
In 1911, the Dutch physicist Heike Onnes had discovered that, when cooled to -269C, solid mercury suddenly lost all resistance to the flow of electric current. This phenomenon – "superconductivity" – was later found in other materials, such as tin and metal alloys. In a loop of wire made of superconducting material, electric currents can flow for years without needing any voltage to be applied. This astonishing phenomenon defied explanation for decades.
In the micro-world of atoms and particles, such as electrons, quantum mechanics applies. The phenomena are often weird, such as the well-known uncertainty principle – the inability to know precisely both the position and speed of an atomic particle. In the large scale, or macro-world, we are used to more "common sense" – the laws of Isaac Newton, which enable us to know both where we are and how fast we are travelling. However, even in the macro-world there are examples where quantum mechanics rules, one such being the phenomenon of superconductivity. There are two types of superconductors, one which completely rejects magnetic fields, and the other, known as "type 2", where superconductivity and magnetism can co-exist.
Landau and Ginzburg used quantum theory to produce a series of equations which successfully predicted that, under certain circumstances, superconductors can tolerate magnetic fields. This led to work by Abrikosov, who discovered how magnetic fields penetrate superconductors, and opened the way to many practical applications.
These breakthroughs led to many ways of achieving superconductivity, even in the presence of large magnetic fields, which today is widely used in science, industry and medicine. In 1962 the first commercial superconducting wire was made using a niobium-titanium alloy. Superconductivity has vast implications in technology, being used in powerful electromagnets, such as are found in MRI scanners in hospitals, in magnetic levitation systems for high-speed transport, and in the world's largest cryogenic facility – the 27km ring of superconducting magnets of the Large Hadron Collider, the particle accelerator, at Cern in Geneva.
In addition to this seminal work on superconductivity, in a career that spanned seven decades Ginzburg authored several fundamental papers in a range of areas: quantum theory; the propagation of electromagnetic waves through the ionosphere; the origin of cosmic rays; radioastronomy and astrophysics. Several of his ideas were regarded as being of Nobel prize calibre.
He held passionate opinions about topics far beyond science, being a strong believer in the global triumph of democracy, and that "secular humanism" would overcome threats such as Islamic terrorism, poverty and Aids. He was one of a group of scientists that helped bring down Trofim Lysenko, whose beliefs about biological inheritance had impeded genetic research in the Soviet Union for decades.
Ginzburg was a vehement atheist, and strongly opposed the growing role of the Russian Orthodox church in state affairs after the 1991 Soviet collapse. He protested against attempts to introduce religious lessons in schools, telling a Russian newspaper in 2007 that "these Orthodox scoundrels want to lure away children's souls". As a result, several Orthodox Christian groups threatened to sue him for "offending millions of Russian Christians".
Having lived under Stalin's yoke, and seen Hitler ravaging Europe, he remained an optimist. "The forces of democracy have saved civilised society and nowadays both nazism and communism have almost sunk into oblivion," he wrote in his Nobel biography. He was certain that this proves that "we can hope for the ultimate triumph of the democratic system and secular humanism all over the world". All that are required, he said, are "the presence of historical memory, and the development of science".
He is survived by Nina, and by the daughter of his first marriage.
• Vitaly Lazarevich Ginzburg, theoretical physicist and astrophysicist, born 4 October 1916; died 8 November 2009
