The Russian Academy of Sciences has announced the death of Vitaly Ginzburg. Ginzburg won the 2003 Nobel Prize for physics and was also known as one of the fathers of the Soviet hydrogen bomb, for which he was awarded the Order of Lenin.

“We thought at the time that we were working to prevent a monopoly on the atomic bomb – Hitler’s monopoly if he got the bomb before Stalin,” Ginzburg said in an interview published last week by Physics World. “The thought of what would happen if Stalin had a monopoly on atomic weapons somehow never entered my head. Scary thought.”

He also told Physics World that “I think that my biggest achievement in physics is connected with the theory of superconductivity.”

His Nobel Prize, shared with Alexei Abrikosov and Anthony Leggett, was for this work.

“He was an outstanding physicist…one of the last physicists with an encyclopaedic knowledge,” said Gennady Mesyats, director of the Lebedev Physical Institute of the Russian Academy of Sciences (RIA Novosti).

In his 2003 autobiography for the Nobel Prize, Ginzburg wrote:

…I am still inclined to believe in the radiant future of mankind. Today on the road to it there are many obstacles, first of all, the Islamic (terrorist) threat, poverty and the lack of education of great masses of population, AIDS and other diseases. But let us remember the situation, for example, in 1943, sixty years ago. Europe was under Hitler’s heel, the USSR, though heroically resisting, was living under the Stalinist yoke. America was not so strong, and the world war was raging.

Was it easier and better than now? The forces of democracy have coped with it, saved the civilized society and nowadays both the Nazism and the communism have almost sunk into oblivion. That is why we can hope for the ultimate triumph of the democratic system and the secular humanism all over the world. The necessary conditions for that are the presence of historical memory and the development of science.