Nobel Lecture: On superconductivity and superfluidity (what I have and have not managed to do) as well as on the “physical minimum” at the beginning of the XXI century

Abstract

First of all I would like to express my heartfelt gratitude to the Swedish Royal Academy of Sciences and its Nobel Committee for physics for awarding me the 2003 Nobel Prize in physics. I am well aware of how difficult it is to select no more than three Laureates out of the far greater number of nominees. So all the more valuable is this award. Personally, I have two additional reasons for appreciating this award. First, I am already 87, the Nobel Prize is not awarded posthumously, and posthumous recognition is not all that significant to me since I am an atheist. Second, the 1958 and 1962 Nobel Prizes were awarded, respectively, to Igor’ Evgen’evich Tamm and Lev Davidovich Landau. Outside of high school, the title of “teacher” quite often describes a formal relationship: for instance, it is applied to the supervisor in the preparation of a thesis. But I believe that your real teachers are those who have made the greatest impact on your work and whose example you have followed. Tamm and Landau ssee Figs. 1 and 2d were precisely these kind of people for me. I feel particularly pleased, because in a sense I have justified their faith in me. Of course, the reason lies not with the Prize itself, but with the fact that my receiving the award after them signifies that I have followed their path. Now about the Nobel Lecture. It is the custom, I do not know whether by rule or natural tradition, that the Nobel Lecture is concerned with the work for which the Prize was awarded. But I am aware of at least one exception. P. L. Kapitza was awarded the 1978 Prize for “his basic inventions and discoveries in the area of lowtemperature physics” But Kapitza’s Lecture was entitled “Plasma and the Controlled Thermonuclear Reactions.” He justified his choice of topic as follows: he had worked in the field of low-temperature physics many years before he had been awarded the Prize and he believed it would be more interesting to speak of what he was currently engaged in. That is why P. L. Kapitza spoke of his efforts to develop a fusion reactor employing highfrequency electromagnetic fields. By the way, this path has not led to success, which is insignificant in the present context. I have not forgotten my “pioneering contributions to the theory of superconductors and superfluids” for which I have received the Prize, but I would like not to dwell on them. The point is that in 1997 I decided to sum up my activities in that field, and I wrote a paper entitled *The 2003 Nobel Prize in Physics was shared by A. A. Abrikosov, Vitaly L. Ginzburg, and Anthony J. Leggett. This lecture is the text of Professor Ginzburg’s address on the occasion of the award. Electronic address: ginzburg@lpi.ru; translated by E. N. Ragozin, edited by K. Franchuk and K. Friedman. FIG. 1. Igor’ Evgen’evich Tamm, 1895–1971. REVIEWS OF MODERN PHYSICS, VOLUME 76, JULY 2004