Ivar Giaever obituary: modest Nobel-winning physicist

Times

30-07-2025

As a Nobel prizewinner, Ivar Giaever was surely within his rights to call his autobiography I am the Smartest Man I Know. But the title was firmly tongue-in-cheek, he insisted, despite his achievements. For a start, he asserted, he was far from the brightest spark at the vast General Electric (GE) research and development facility in New York where he tinkered with superconductors. 'There were several hundred scientists at the laboratory all with a better education than I had had and maybe half of them were smarter than me,' he wrote.
He believed that a Nobel could indicate good fortune rather than exceptional intellect. 'Some winners are smart,' he once told a reporter, 'some are average and a few are actually dumb.'
It was true that higher education was a low point for Giaever. While studying mechanical engineering at the Norwegian Institute of Technology in Trondheim his main focus was playing bridge, chess and billiards. Though the university champion in the latter, he did not win trophies for his academic performance. Giaever asked his physics professor about his examination results and was told: 'Your answers are among the worst that have ever been handed in!'
As luck would have it, this dismal effort helped Giaever to secure a job at a renowned GE industrial laboratory near Albany, the New York state capital. Eyeing his grades, the personnel director exclaimed: 'I see you have 4.0 in both physics and mathematics, you must have been a very good student!' Giaever wisely neglected to mention that the grading system in Norway worked in the opposite direction to the US, meaning that 4.0 was the lowest pass mark rather than the top grade it signalled in American schools.
Setting aside his educational record and self-deprecation, Giaever was, of course, very smart. He excelled during a corporate training programme and when he was hired in 1958 he became, according to his family, the only scientific researcher at the laboratory without a PhD.
Giaever began experimenting with superconductors — materials that can conduct electricity without energy loss — and in 1960 performed a breakthrough quantum mechanics experiment on a phenomenon known as the tunnel effect. In the late Fifties a Japanese physicist working for the Sony Corporation, Leo Esaki, had demonstrated electron tunnelling in semiconductors. He showed that the particles had wave-like properties that, in the right conditions, allowed them to 'tunnel' through ordinarily impenetrable barriers. Using metal strips separated by a thin oxide layer, Giaever proved this also occurred in superconductors.
Such insights were valuable to theoretical physicists and to makers of modern electronic equipment that uses diodes, transistors and lasers. Giaever's experiment supported what is known as the BCS theory. The authors of that 1957 theory on superconductor behaviour were awarded the Nobel prize for physics in 1972; Giaever secured the honour a year later, aged 44, crediting his success to advice from colleagues as he shared the prize with Esaki and Brian Josephson, a Welsh theoretical physicist whose work while a graduate student at Cambridge University built on Giaever's achievements.
Ivar Giaever was born in Bergen in 1929 to John, a pharmacist, and Gudrun (née Skaarud), who helped in the pharmacy and took care of the family. Neither went to high school. He grew up on a farm, which proved useful during wartime food shortages, and enjoyed skiing and taking machinery apart to see how it worked. Schools closed each autumn so that children could spend three weeks in the fields harvesting potatoes. Aged 14 he met a local girl, Inger Skramstad, who became an au pair in England and a ski instructor and community volunteer in the United States; they married in 1952.
Before entering the Institute of Technology Giaever had a year of work experience at an ammunition factory, experimenting during his lunch hour to automate the lathe he operated. It was dangerous work; several colleagues were missing thumbs and he narrowly escaped serious injury when he used a steel milling machine incorrectly and a tool snapped and recoiled forcefully, grazing his chin.
After his degree and compulsory military service he took a job with the patent office in Oslo, assessing applications related to locks, hinges and knitting machines. Money was tight: on one occasion, Ivar and Inger accepted a dinner invitation but could not afford a babysitter, so he tied their infant son, John, to the bed and went out. With a baby and a housing crisis so severe there was an eight-year waiting list for an apartment, they decided to follow the example of a friend who had emigrated to the US and, Ivar recalled, bought 'a car as large as a tank'.
With only $200 in their pockets the family moved to Toronto, where one of Inger's sisters lived, but at first life in Canada was no easier. Giaever used a knife to slit the front of his ill-fitting shoes to ease the rubbing pain as he trudged the city's streets looking for a job in the dead of winter. He tried the GE headquarters in Toronto. Directed by a secretary to walk down several corridors to the employment office, he took a wrong turn and found himself out on the street. Disheartened and wondering if he had been tricked, he was on the brink of leaving but went back and was guided to the correct entrance.
Giaever was hired as an engineer, testing electrical equipment and improving his mathematics skills on a company training scheme. To enhance his salary and career prospects he emigrated to the US, continuing his training with GE and enrolling at the nearby Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute (RPI) for a master's degree in physics before finishing a doctorate there in 1964, the year he became an American citizen. He was invited to a meeting of scientists in Moscow, which led to him being interviewed by the FBI, and to a conference in Brighton, where the main inconvenience was the stones on the beach.
Bringing their hulking Chevrolet station wagon across the Pond in 1968, the family spent a sabbatical year in England. Giaever studied biophysics on a Guggenheim fellowship at Clare Hall, Cambridge, and observed that even a meeting about his overdraft with his bank manager started with a glass of sherry. Formalities were not the only culture shock. 'Americans take great pride in working hard while the English are more concerned with appearing very smart,' he wrote. 'In Cambridge people did not seem to care about what was correct or not; the point was to win the argument.'
Applying the techniques and principles of physics to biology was a growing passion and on his return to the US he began experiments with the goal of detecting hepatitis antibodies. Though his GE bosses had scant interest in biology the prestige of his Nobel victory gave him free rein to pursue whatever interested him. When news of the triumph emerged the company sent a limousine to whisk him to work and rolled out a red carpet at the laboratory entrance. Giaever worked in the laboratory of the celebrated polio vaccine developer Jonas Salk at the Salk Institute in San Diego. He left GE in 1988 for a professorship at the RPI, had a spell as a professor at the University of Oslo and co-founded a biophysics company centred on cell research and drug discoveries.
Careful with money given his earlier struggles, he habitually lunched on cups of spicy noodles bought from Walmart for 28 cents apiece. Leisure time was spent playing board games, windsurfing and skiing into his mid-eighties. Inger died in 2023; he is survived by their son, John, a retired engineer, and three daughters, Anne, a teacher, Guri, an associate professor in pharmaceutical sciences, and Trine, an artist.
Giaever and his wife lived in the same house for 60 years but travelled the world. Aged 80, he took a teaching position in Seoul and made the national news on a trip to South Korea when he told a journalist that the nation lacked Nobel laureates because fervent debates can inspire progress and Koreans are too polite to argue with authority figures. Unafraid to speak his mind, Giaever possessed an irreverent wit honed from dedicated viewing of the sitcom, Seinfeld. He was a sought-after speaker and frequent guest expert on an American public radio science programme.
A natural sceptic — aged six he declared the Easter bunny to be a fiction, a stance that cost him sweets — he was a prominent self-described climate change denier and resigned from the American Physical Society in 2011 because it described the evidence for global warming as 'incontrovertible'. He wrote: 'In my view, nothing in science is incontrovertible.'
Asked how it felt to win the Nobel, he liked to reply: 'I suddenly became the most famous person I knew.' Reflecting on a career that brought him several other prestigious prizes and more than 30 patents, he mused about how different it all would have been had he given up and gone home after walking the wrong way in the GE office in Toronto: a 50-50 decision that transformed his future. 'Life is not fair,' he wrote in his 2016 book, 'and I, for one, am happy about that.'
Ivar Giaever, Nobel prize-winning physicist, was born on April 5, 1929. He died after a period of declining health on June 20, 2025, aged 96