Ivar Giaever

Ivar Giaever^[a] (April 5, 1929 – June 20, 2025) was a Norwegian-American experimental physicist who shared the 1973 Nobel Prize in Physics with Leo Esaki and Brian Josephson. One half of the prize was jointly awarded to Esaki and Giaever "for their experimental discoveries regarding tunneling phenomena in semiconductors and superconductors, respectively."^[2]

Ivar Giaever was born on April 5, 1929, in Bergen, Norway. He studied mechanical engineering at the Norwegian Institute of Technology in Trondheim, graduating with an M.Eng. in 1952. The following year, he was employed by the Norwegian Patent Office as a patent examiner. In 1954, Giaever emigrated to Canada, where he joined the Advanced Engineering Program of General Electric Canada. He then moved to the United States in 1956, joining the General Electric Research Laboratory in 1958.^[3]

In 1964, Giaever received his Ph.D. from Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute (RPI) with a thesis, written under Hillard Bell Huntington, titled The Conductivity and the Hall Effect in Binary Alloys.^[4] He became a naturalized U.S. citizen that year. 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.^[3]

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.^[5]

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.^[6] 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.^[b] 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.^[7]

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.^[3][8]

Giaever was a climate change denier, who fueled doubt on climate change,^[9] for example calling it a "new religion." However, he had presented no strong evidence to support this position.^[10] On September 13, 2011, he resigned from the American Physical Society, after the organization called the evidence of damaging global warming "incontrovertible."^[11]

Giaever was a science advisor to the Heartland Institute, an American conservative and libertarian think tank that denies climate change.^[12]

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.^[13]

In 1952, Giaever married his childhood sweetheart, Inger Skramstad, who died on September 12, 2023, at the age of 94. They had four children.^[14]

Giaever was an atheist.^[15]

• Giaever, Ivar (1960). "Electron Tunneling Between Two Superconductors". Physical Review Letters. 5 (10): 464–466. Bibcode:1960PhRvL...5..464G. doi:10.1103/PhysRevLett.5.464.
• Giaever, Ivar (1974). "Electron tunneling and superconductivity". Reviews of Modern Physics. 46 (2): 245–250. Bibcode:1974RvMP...46..245G. doi:10.1103/RevModPhys.46.245.

• Interview with Professor Ivar Giaever, from the Official Nobel Prize Website
• Ivar Giaever on Nobelprize.org including the Nobel Lecture, December 12, 1973 Electron Tunneling and Superconductivity
• University of Oslo website about Ivar Giaever
• Family genealogy