Ivar Giaever is a well-known Norwegian-American physicist who won the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1973 for his work on tunneling phenomena in solids. He was born into a middle-class family in Norway in the first half of the twentieth century and spent his early years there. At the age of twenty-five, he traveled to Canada and joined the Canadian arm of General Electric after getting a mechanical engineering degree from one of Norway’s largest and most prestigious institutions. He was quickly transferred to the company’s American division, where he completed the engineering course. He was then transferred to the General Electric Research and Development Center in New York, where he developed an interest in physics while working there. He quickly returned to his Nobel Laureate work on tunneling through superconductors. At the same time, he began work on his PhD at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute. He received his PhD four years before completing his Nobel Prize-winning research. In 1964, Dr. Giaever became a US citizen, but he kept close ties with Norway. Following his retirement from General Electric, he worked as a faculty member at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in New York and the University of Oslo in Norway. He is presently a member of a number of prestigious organizations.
Childhood and Adolescence
Ivar Giaever was born on April 5, 1929, into a middle-class family in Bergen, Norway. John A. Giaever, his father, worked as a pharmacy in Totem. Ivar grew up in this town for the majority of his life.
He began his schooling at Totem and later transferred to Hamar, where he finished his secondary education. After graduating from high school in 1947, he went to work for Raufoss Munition Factories for a year.
In 1948, he enrolled in the Norwegian University of Science and Technology in Trondheim (Norges teknisk-naturvitenskapelige universitet). It was Norway’s largest university, with a concentration on engineering courses. He studied mechanical engineering there and graduated in 1952 with a bachelor’s degree.
He completed his military service as a corporal in the Norwegian Army in 1953. After that, he went to work for the Norwegian government as a patent examiner for another year. He moved to Canada in 1954.
Career of Ivar Giaever
Ivar Giaever began his career in Canada as an architect’s assistant, but he quickly changed jobs and joined the Canadian arm of General Electric. He enrolled in the company’s Advanced Engineering Program while he was there.
He was transferred to the American unit of the General Electric Company in 1956. He finished the company’s A, B, and C engineering courses while working as an applied mathematician on numerous assignments.
He was transferred to the General Electric Research and Development Center in Schenectady, New York, once more in 1958. His interest in physics grew while he was working here. In 1958, he began his doctoral studies in physics at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in Troy, New York.
Giaever began researching in the fields of thin films, tunneling, and superconductivity at the General Electric Research and Development Center. Leo Esaki, a Japanese researcher, had discovered electron tunneling in semiconductors by this time. Giaever followed suit and started working in the same direction.
In 1960, he discovered that tunneling could also occur in superconductors. He used a thin layer of oxide that was coated with layers of superconducting metals to conduct the experiment. The experiment also proved the presence of an energy gap, or a range of energy in which no electron states may exist.
Giaever received his PhD in physics in 1964 and continued to work on tunneling. In 1969, he became interested in biophysics. He came to England after earning the Guggenheim Fellowship and worked on biophysics for a year at Clare Hall, University of Cambridge.
He returned to the General Electric Research and Development Center in 1970, where he resumed his biophysics research. He began his research on the behavior of protein molecules at solid surfaces and the interaction of cells with surfaces the next year.
For this effort, he was named a Coolidge Fellow at General Electric in May 1973. In the same year, he was awarded the Nobel Prize. “The Nobel Prize opened a lot of doors, but it also supplied me with a lot of diversions,” he says.
Despite this, he continued to work on biophysics, attempting to address biological problems using physical methods and thinking. He left General Electric in 1988 to become an Institute Professor at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute. He was also a professor at the University of Oslo in Norway at the time.
His experiments on the motility of mammalian cells in tissue culture, which involved growing both normal and malignant cells on small electrodes, are among his most important later work. He’s also worked on committees for various international conferences and has been elected to a number of key panels.
Major Projects of Ivar Giaever
Giaever is most known for his tunneling research from the 1960s. Combining superconductor technology with Esaki’s tunneling research, he demonstrated that electrons can pass through “holes” in solid-state devices like waves of radiation. His work defied superconductivity’s traditional constraints.
Achievements & Awards
Ivar Giaever was given the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1973, along with Leo Esaki and Brian D. Josephson, “for their experimental findings relating tunneling phenomena in semiconductors and superconductors, respectively.” Esaki and Josephson had both worked on the same project at the same time.
The American Physical Society awarded him the Oliver E. Buckley Prize in 1965, and the National Academy of Engineering gave him the Zworykin Award in 1974.
Personal History and Legacy
Ivar Giaever married Inger Skramstad in 1954. They have four children and a number of grandchildren.
Trivia Giaever was elected to the Executive Committee of the American Physical Society’s Solid State division. When the Society accepted the idea that global warming is “indisputable,” he resigned, claiming that nothing in science is “indisputable” and that man-made global warming is a “new religion.”
Estimated Net Worth
Ivar Giaever is one of the wealthiest physicists and one of the most well-known. Ivar Giaever’s net worth is estimated to be $1.5 million, according to Wikipedia, Forbes, and Business Insider.