Ivar Giaever

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Ivar Giæver
Ivar Giaever.jpg
Born (1929-04-05) April 5, 1929 (age 95)
Bergen, Norway
Nationality Norway, United States (1964)
Fields Physics
Alma mater Norwegian Institute of Technology,
Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute
Known for Solid-state physics
Notable awards Oliver E. Buckley Condensed Matter Prize (1965)
Nobel Prize in Physics (1973)

Ivar Giaever (Norwegian: Giæver, IPA: [ˈiːvɑr ˈjeːvər]; born April 5, 1929) is a Norwegian-American physicist who shared the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1973 with Leo Esaki and Brian Josephson "for their discoveries regarding tunnelling phenomena in solids".[1] Giaever's share of the prize was specifically for his "experimental discoveries regarding tunnelling phenomena in superconductors".[2] Giaever is an institute professor emeritus at the Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, a professor-at-large at the University of Oslo, and the president of Applied Biophysics.[3]

Early life

Giaever earned a degree in mechanical engineering from the Norwegian Institute of Technology in Trondheim in 1952. In 1954, he emigrated from Norway to Canada, where he was employed by the Canadian division of General Electric. He moved to the United States four years later, joining General Electric's Corporate Research and Development Center in Schenectady, New York, in 1958. He has lived in Niskayuna, New York, since then, taking up US citizenship in 1964. While working for General Electric, Giaever earned a Ph.D. at the Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in 1964.[4]

The Nobel Prize

The work that led to Giaever's Nobel Prize was performed at General Electric in 1960. Following on Esaki's discovery of electron tunnelling in semiconductors in 1958, Giaever showed that tunnelling also took place in superconductors, demonstrating tunnelling through a very thin layer of oxide surrounded on both sides by metal in a superconducting or normal state.[5] Giaever's experiments demonstrated the existence of an energy gap in superconductors, one of the most important predictions of the BCS theory of superconductivity, which had been developed in 1957.[6] Giaever's experimental demonstration of tunnelling in superconductors stimulated the theoretical physicist Brian Josephson to work on the phenomenon, leading to his prediction of the Josephson effect in 1962. Esaki and Giaever shared half of the 1973 Nobel Prize, and Josephson received the other half.[1]

Giaever's research later in his career was mainly in the field of biophysics. In 1969, he researched Biophysics for a year as a fellow at Clare Hall, University of Cambridge, through a Guggenheim Fellowship, and he continued to work in this area after he returned to the US.[4]

He has co-signed a letter from over 70 Nobel laureate scientists to the Louisiana Legislature supporting the repeal of Louisiana’s creationism law, the Louisiana Science Education Act.[7]

Other prizes

In addition to the Nobel Prize, he has also been awarded the Oliver E. Buckley Prize by the American Physical Society in 1965, and the Zworykin Award by the National Academy of Engineering in 1974.[3]

In 1985 he was awarded an honorary degree, doctor honoris causa, at the Norwegian Institute of Technology, later part of Norwegian University of Science and Technology.[8]

He is a member of the Norwegian Academy of Science and Letters.[9]

Global warming

Giaever has said man-made global warming is a "new religion."[10] In the minority report released by the U.S. Senate Environment and Public Works Committee in March 2009,[11] Giaever said, "I am a skeptic…Global warming has become a new religion."[11][12]

In a featured story in Norway's largest newspaper, Aftenposten, 26 June 2011, Giaever stated, "It is amazing how stable temperature has been over the last 150 years."[13]

On 13 September 2011, Giaever resigned from the American Physical Society over its official position. The APS Fellow noted: "In the APS it is ok to discuss whether the mass of the proton changes over time and how a multi-universe behaves, but the evidence of global warming is incontrovertible?"[14]

As part of the 62nd Lindau Nobel Laureate Meeting, Giaever referred to agreement with the evidence of climate change as a "religion" and commented on the significance of the apparent rise in temperature when he stated, "What does it mean that the temperature has gone up 0.8 degrees Kelvin, Probably nothing." Referring to the selection of evidence in his presentation, Giaever stated "I pick and choose when I give this talk just the way the previous speaker (Mario Molina) picked and chose when he gave his talk." Giaever concluded his presentation with a pronouncement: "Is climate change pseudoscience? If I’m going to answer the question, the answer is: absolutely.".[15][16]

Giaever repeated his claims in a speech at the same place in 2015,[17] referring to data on global average temperature published amongst others by NASA [18] that show global average surface temperature has risen less than 1K in 140 years,[19] and not risen at all for the years from 2000 - 2014.[20]

A main point of his speech was discussing reliability of the statistical calculation of this temperature with respect to the quite inhomogeneous spatial distribution of measurement locations over the globe, especially the poor coverage in the southern hemisphere.[21] He highlighted the fact evident from the dataset used by NASA for the calculations that there have been only 8 measurement locations on the entire antarctic continent, which holds the greatest and currently further increasing mass of ice found on earth. He claimed that these facts erode the credibility of accuracy usually attached to these data, notwithstanding that established statistical procedures have been used to cope with that lack of data statistical independence and hence data quality.

Another main point was that observed significant change in athmospheric carbon dioxide (CO2) concentrations in a magnitude of 40% during the last 250 years of the industrial age [22] does in no way correlate with the observed temperature change [23] in that time, thus experimentally rendering invalid the claim that rising concentrations of CO2 are the cause of global warming, as stated by the UN led Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) and leading climatologists from different countries in a vast amount of publications, and widely believed as a fact in scientific as well as political discussions worldwide.

Giaever, on the base of the facts presented, urged the scientific community to rethink and to reject these claims as baseless or at least not properly founded, and to redirect the immense funds invested in technologies aiming to reduce CO2 emissions to the real problems of humanity.

Giaever is currently a science advisor at The Heartland Institute.[24]

Selected publications

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References

  1. ↑ 1.0 1.1 Lua error in package.lua at line 80: module 'strict' not found.
  2. ↑ Lua error in package.lua at line 80: module 'strict' not found.
  3. ↑ 3.0 3.1 Lua error in package.lua at line 80: module 'strict' not found.
  4. ↑ 4.0 4.1 Lua error in package.lua at line 80: module 'strict' not found.
  5. ↑ Lua error in package.lua at line 80: module 'strict' not found.
  6. ↑ Bardeen, Cooper, and Schrieffer won the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1972 for this theoretical advance, which bears their initials.
  7. ↑ Nobel Laureate Letter
  8. ↑ Lua error in package.lua at line 80: module 'strict' not found.
  9. ↑ Lua error in package.lua at line 80: module 'strict' not found.
  10. ↑ Lua error in package.lua at line 80: module 'strict' not found.
  11. ↑ 11.0 11.1 Lua error in package.lua at line 80: module 'strict' not found.
  12. ↑ Lua error in package.lua at line 80: module 'strict' not found.
  13. ↑ Lua error in package.lua at line 80: module 'strict' not found.
  14. ↑ [dead link] Lua error in package.lua at line 80: module 'strict' not found.
  15. ↑ Lindau Nobel Laureate Meeting: From the Big Bang to the Big Controversy (aka Climate Change)
  16. ↑ Giaver, I. "The Strange Case of Global Warming", Lecture, 62nd Lindau Meeting, July 2012
  17. ↑ Ivar Giaever (2015): Global Warming Revisited, lecture, 65th Lindau Nobel laureate conference, 1st July 2015
  18. ↑ NASA's Goddard Institute for Space Sciences, Surface Temperature Analysis (GISTEMP)
  19. ↑ Global Annual Mean Surface Air Temperature Change, Diagram from Hansen, J., R. Ruedy, M. Sato, and K. Lo, 2010: Global surface temperature change. Rev. Geophys., 48, RG4004, doi:10.1029/2010RG000345, regularly updated by NASA's GISTEMP division with more recent data
  20. ↑ Global Monthly Mean Surface Temperature Change, Diagram from Hansen, J.E., R. Ruedy, M. Sato, M. Imhoff, W. Lawrence, D. Easterling, T. Peterson, and T. Karl, 2001: A closer look at United States and global surface temperature change. J. Geophys. Res., 106, 23947-23963, doi:10.1029/2001JD000354, regularly updated by NASA's GISTEMP division with more recent data
  21. ↑ original graph from NASA's GISS GISTEMP, as captured from the video of Giaever's 2015 lecture.
  22. ↑ Wikipedia article on Greenhouse gases
  23. ↑ http://data.giss.nasa.gov/gistemp/graphs_v3/
  24. ↑ Lua error in package.lua at line 80: module 'strict' not found.

External links

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