Yakov Zeldovich

Yakov Borisovich Zeldovich

From 1943, Zeldovich, a self-taught physicist, started his career by playing a crucial role in the development of the former Soviet program of nuclear weapons. In 1963, he returned to academia to embark on pioneering contributions on the fundamental understanding of the thermodynamics of black holes and expanding the scope of physical cosmology.^[4]

Biography

Early life and education

Yakov Zeldovich was born into a

His father, Boris Naumovich Zeldovich, was a lawyer; his mother, Anna Petrovna Zeldovich (née Kiveliovich), a translator from French to Russian, was a member of the Writer's Union.^[6] Despite being born into a devoted and religious Jewish family, Zeldovich was an "absolute atheist".^[7][8]

Zeldovich was an autodidact. He was regarded as having a remarkably versatile intellect, and during his life he explored and made major contributions to a wide range of scientific endeavors.^[4] From a given opportunity in May 1931, he secured an appointment as a laboratory assistant at the Institute of Chemical Physics of the Academy of Sciences of the Soviet Union, and remained associated with the institute for the remainder of his life.^{[6][4]: 301} As a laboratory assistant, he received preliminary instructions on the topics involved in the physical chemistry and built up his reputation among his seniors at the Institute of Chemical Physics.^[6]: 301

From 1932 to 1934, Zeldovich attended the undergraduate courses on physics and mathematics at the Leningrad State University (now Saint Petersburg State University), and later attended the technical lectures on introductory physics at the Leningrad Polytechnic Institute (now Peter the Great St. Petersburg Polytechnic University).^{[6]: 301 [9]: 2–5}

In 1936, he was successful in his candidacy for the

In 1939, Zeldovich prepared his dissertation based on the mathematical theory of the physical interpretation of nitrogen oxidation, and successfully received the Doctor of Sciences in mathematical physics when it was reviewed by Alexander Frumkin.^{[10]: 39–40} Zeldovich discovered its mechanism, known in physical chemistry as the thermal NO_x mechanism or Zeldovich mechanism.

Soviet program of nuclear weapons

Zeldovich is regarded as a secret principal of the Soviet nuclear weapons project; his travels abroad were highly restricted, to Eastern Europe, under close Soviet security.^{[11]: 198–199} Soon after the discovery of nuclear fission (by German chemist Otto Hahn in 1939) Russian physicists had begun investigating the scope of nuclear-fission physics, and undertook seminars on that topic; Igor Kurchatov and Yulii Khariton were engaged in 1940.^{[6]: 79–80}

In May 1941, Zeldovich worked with Khariton in constructing a theory, on the kinetics of nuclear reactions in the presence of the

With Isaak Gurevich, Isaak Pomeranchuk, and Khariton, Zeldovich prepared a scientific report on the feasibility of releasing energy through nuclear fusion triggered by an atomic explosion, and presented it to Igor Kurchatov.^[4] Zeldovich had benefitted from physical and technical knowledge provided by German physicist Klaus Fuchs and American physicist Theodore Hall, who each had worked on the American Manhattan Project to develop nuclear weapons.^{[6]: 89–90}

In 1949, Zeldovich led a team of physicists that conducted the first

In 1952, Zeldovich began work in the field of elementary particles and their transformations. He predicted the beta decay of a pi meson. Together with Semyon Gershtein he noticed the analogy between the weak and electromagnetic interactions, and in 1960, he predicted the muon catalysis (more precisely, the muon-catalysed dt-fusion) phenomenon. In 1977, Zeldovich together with Fyodor Shapiro [ru] was awarded the Kurchatov Medal, the highest award in nuclear physics of the Soviet Union. The citation was "for prediction of characteristics of ultracold neutrons, their detection and investigation". He was elected academician of the USSR Academy of Sciences on 20 June 1958. He was a head of division at the Institute of the Applied Mathematics of the USSR Academy of Sciences from 1965 until January 1983.^{[citation needed]}

In early 1960s, Zeldovich started working in

In 1974, in collaboration with A. G. Polnarev, suggested the existence of a gravitational memory effect, for which a system of freely falling particles initially at relative rest are displaced after the passing of a burst of gravitational radiation.^[16]

Black hole thermodynamics

Zeldovich played a key role in developing the theory of black hole evaporation due to Hawking radiation. Zeldovich and Charles W. Misner concomitantly predicted the possibility of particle generation by rotating Kerr black holes in 1971, 1972. Previously, In 1965, Zeldovich had predicted that Kerr black holes would split the emission lines of photons as in a Zeeman effect. During Stephen Hawking's visit to Moscow in 1973, Soviet scientists Zeldovich and Alexei Starobinsky showed Hawking that, according to the quantum mechanical uncertainty principle, rotating black holes should create and emit particles.^[17]

Family

With his wife, Varvara Pavlovna Konstantinova, Yakov Zeldovich had a son and two daughters who were also physicists: son –

Zeldovich also had a daughter, Annushka, with O.K. Shiryaeva.[19]

He had one more daughter in 1945, Alexandra Varkovitskaya, with a linguist and folklorist Ludmila Varkovitskaya.^{[citation needed]}

Zeldovich had another son with Nina Nikolaevna Agapova in 1958, whose name was Leonid Yakovlevich Agapov; he died in 2016 at the age of 58.^{[citation needed]}

Publications

Books

Awards and honors

Igor Kurchatov called him a "genius" and Andrei Sakharov named him "a man of universal scientific interests." After the first meeting in Moscow, Stephen W. Hawking wrote to Zeldovich: "now I know that you are a real person and not a group of scientists like Bourbaki."^[20] He was a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences (1975),^[21] the United States National Academy of Sciences (1979),^[22] and the American Philosophical Society (1979).^[23]