It is with great sadness that Contemporary Physics notes the death of one of its longest serving members of the Editorial Board, Dr Vitaly Ginzburg, who died on November 8th 2009 aged 93. He was active right to the end, and was a great source of sound advice to the Journal. Ginzburg was an outstanding Russian theoretical physicist who worked for essentially all of his life at the Lebedev Physical Institute in Moscow. He published hundreds of scientific papers and dozens of books. He was particularly known for his work on superconductivity and low temperature physics, for which he shared the Nobel Prize in 2003 with Aleksei Abrikosov and Antony Leggett (another Contemporary Physics Board member). He was awarded many other medals and prizes, among them the Wolf Prize in 1994.
He was also for a brief period a key member of the Soviet atomic weapons programme led by Igor Kurchatov and Yuli Khariton, and worked with Yakov Zeldovich and Andrei Sakharov; it was Ginzburg who suggested the use of lithium deuteride (called by him ``Lidy'') within what is now regarded as a boosted fission warhead to generate the tritium for fusion in the 1953 400kt Joe4 “layer-cake” device. But it was for his low temperature physics that he will of course be mainly remembered. Indeed, I have on my desk his last book On Superconductivity and Superfluidity: a Scientific Autobiography, the new English translation of which he sent me just a few months before his death. This book, with disarmingly frank chapters entitled “What I Have and Have Not Managed to do” presents a wonderful picture of a remarkable physicist.