Ivar Giaever
Norwegian–American physicist (1929–2025)
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Biography
Ivar Giaever was born on April 5, 1929, in Bergen, Norway, the second of three children of John A. Giaever, a pharmacist. He grew up in Toten, where he attended elementary school, before moving to Hamar to receive his secondary education. From 1948 to 1952, Giaever studied mechanical engineering at the Norwegian Institute of Technology (now the Norwegian University of Science and Technology), graduating with a Master of Science in Technology. In 1953, he completed his military service in the Norwegian Army, before going on to work for the Norwegian Patent Office as a patent examiner.
In 1954, Giaever joined the Advanced Engineering Program of Canadian General Electric. He then immigrated to the United States in 1956, joining the General Electric Research Laboratory in 1958. While working for General Electric, Giaever pursued doctoral studies at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute (RPI), where he obtained a Doctor of Philosophy in Theoretical Physics in 1964. In 1988, he left General Electric to become an Institute Professor at RPI. The same year, he also became a professor at the University of Oslo, sponsored by Statoil.
Giaever died on June 20, 2025, in Schenectady, New York, at the age of 96. He is buried in the cemetery of Hoff Church in Østre Toten, Norway.
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Research
From 1958 to 1969, Giaever worked on thin films, tunneling, and superconductivity. In 1960, following from Leo Esaki's discovery of tunneling in semiconductors in 1957, Giaever showed that tunneling also took place in superconductors, demonstrating tunneling through a very thin layer of oxide surrounded on both sides by metal in a superconducting or normal state. His 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. Giaever's experimental demonstration of tunneling 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 in Physics, and Josephson received the other half.
Giaever's research later in his career was mainly in the field of biophysics. In 1969, he studied biophysics for a year at the University of Cambridge in England, through a Guggenheim Fellowship. He continued to work in this area after he returned to the United States in 1970, founding the company Applied BioPhysics, Inc., in 1993.
Activism
Giaever was a climate change denier, who fueled doubt on climate change, for example calling it a "new religion." However, he had presented no strong evidence to support this position. On September 13, 2011, he resigned from the American Physical Society, after the organization called the evidence of damaging global warming "incontrovertible."
Giaever was a science advisor to the Heartland Institute, an American conservative and libertarian think tank that denies climate change.
Giaever co-signed a letter from over 70 Nobel laureate scientists to the Louisiana State Legislature supporting the repeal of the anti-evolution Louisiana Science Education Act.
Personal life
In 1952, Giaever married his childhood sweetheart, Inger Skramstad, who died on September 12, 2023, at the age of 94. They had four children.
In 1964, Giaever became a naturalized U.S. citizen.
Giaever was an atheist.