Yakov Lvovich Alpert (
Russian
Russian(s) refers to anything related to Russia, including:
*Russians (, ''russkiye''), an ethnic group of the East Slavic peoples, primarily living in Russia and neighboring countries
*Rossiyane (), Russian language term for all citizens and peo ...
: Яков Львович Альперт) (March 1, 1911 – October 5, 2010) was a Russian Empire-born American physicist whose principal field of research was space plasma physics.
Biography
He was born at
Ivnitsy, a village near
Zhitomir
Zhytomyr ( uk, Жито́мир, translit=Zhytomyr ; russian: Жито́мир, Zhitomir ; pl, Żytomierz ; yi, זשיטאָמיר, Zhitomir; german: Schytomyr ) is a city in the north of the western half of Ukraine. It is the administrative ...
, in the
Russian Empire
The Russian Empire was an empire and the final period of the Russian monarchy from 1721 to 1917, ruling across large parts of Eurasia. It succeeded the Tsardom of Russia following the Treaty of Nystad, which ended the Great Northern War. ...
. In 1928 he obtained an excellent grade in the entrance examination for the Ukrainian Polytechnic Institute, but because his father, a commercial traveler, was considered not to be a worker, he was refused admission; instead, he took employment as a carpenter. In 1929 he left Zhitomir for
Moscow
Moscow ( , US chiefly ; rus, links=no, Москва, r=Moskva, p=mɐskˈva, a=Москва.ogg) is the capital and largest city of Russia. The city stands on the Moskva River in Central Russia, with a population estimated at 13.0 million ...
, where he worked first as a builder's labourer, then as a draughtsman for architectural exhibitions. He was able to get a job as a technician at the Radio Institute of the Ministry of Communications in 1931, and from that time he remained in his chosen field of physics.
During his scientific career in the
USSR
The Soviet Union,. officially the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics. (USSR),. was a transcontinental country that spanned much of Eurasia from 1922 to 1991. A flagship communist state, it was nominally a federal union of fifteen nationa ...
, Alpert worked from 1931 to 1934 at the Communications Radio Institute; then, from 1935 until 1951 at the
Lebedev Physical Institute
The Lebedev Physical Institute of the Russian Academy of Sciences (LPI RAS or just LPI) (in russian: Физи́ческий институ́т имени П.Н.Ле́бедева Российской академии наук (ФИАН)), situated ...
(FIAN) of the Academy of Sciences; and finally at the Institute of Terrestrial Magnetism, Propagation of Radio Waves, and Ionosphere (
IZMIRAN
The Pushkov Institute of Terrestrial Magnetism, Ionosphere and Radiowave Propagation of the Russian Academy of Sciences (IZMIRAN, russian: Институт земного магнетизма, ионосферы и распространения р ...
) of the Academy of Sciences, from 1952 until he left the USSR in 1987.
In 1973 he and his wife Svetlana Pivkova decided to emigrate. The first step was to obtain a letter from a relative in Israel, inviting them to settle there; at that time, even non-Jews leaving the Soviet Union could only go to Israel. He requested such a letter through Israel's Academy of Sciences, and in due course received one. Its arrival was noticed by the Soviet authorities, and as was then customary he was demoted at his place of work, in his case to a post of Senior Scientist with a reduced salary, while she was dismissed from her post (at a different Institute) and could not obtain one elsewhere. In 1975 they were finally permitted to apply for exit visas, but this application was refused, as were 26 other such applications they made during the next 12 years. During this period, he took an active part in a scientific seminar to maintain his skills and those of his fellow “
refusenik
Refusenik (russian: отказник, otkaznik, ; alternatively spelt refusnik) was an unofficial term for individuals—typically, but not exclusively, Soviet Jews—who were denied permission to emigrate, primarily to Israel, by the authori ...
s”. It was organized by
Victor Brailovsky
Dr Victor Brailovsky ( he, ויקטור בריילובסקי, born 27 December 1935) is a computer scientist, mathematician, aliyah activist and a former Israeli politician. He served as Minister of Science and Technology for six days in 2004. In ...
, and the other participants included
Alexander Lerner
Alexander Yakovlevich Lerner (russian: Александр Яковлевич Лернер; 7 September 1913, Vinnytsia, Russian Empire – 6 April 2004, Rehovot, Israel) was a scientist and Soviet refusenik.
He was born to a Jewish family in Vinn ...
,
Yuri Orlov
Yuri Fyodorovich Orlov (russian: Ю́рий Фёдорович Орло́в, 13 August 1924 – 27 September 2020) was a particle accelerator physicist, human rights activist, Soviet dissident, founder of the Moscow Helsinki Group, a founding ...
, and
Anatoly Sharansky
Natan Sharansky ( he, נתן שרנסקי; russian: Ната́н Щара́нский; uk, Натан Щаранський, born Anatoly Borisovich Shcharansky on 20 January 1948); uk, Анатолій Борисович Щаранський, ...
; though not himself a candidate for emigration,
Andrei Sakharov
Andrei Dmitrievich Sakharov ( rus, Андрей Дмитриевич Сахаров, p=ɐnˈdrʲej ˈdmʲitrʲɪjevʲɪtɕ ˈsaxərəf; 21 May 192114 December 1989) was a Soviet nuclear physicist, dissident, nobel laureate and activist for nu ...
often attended the seminar and supported the refuseniks until his exile to
Gorky in 1980. Following the arrest of Brailovsky in 1981, these seminars were often held at the Alperts' apartment.
In 1987, the Alperts received their visas and left for the US, where they arrived in 1988 and settled near Boston. For the rest of his professional life he was a Senior Staff Scientist at the
Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics. He never retired formally, but his last publication under the auspices of the Center for Astrophysics was made in 2001.
Scientific work
Alpert's main scientific interests at the FIAN and the IZMIRAN were
* Propagation of radio waves, particularly natural ones (i.e., "atmospherics") below and within the ionosphere.
* Physical structure of the ionosphere and the magnetosphere, and plasma wave processes in these regions.
* Interaction of moving bodies with a plasma.
Between 1936 and 2001, he had 8 books published in Russian and 11 in English (9 original monographs, 3 second editions), the last one being his autobiography.
Also he published about 200 scientific papers in Russian or in English and a dozen popular scientific papers in Russian. Forty-three of them are listed in
Web of Science.
References
External links
* Y.L. Alpert
''Tribute to the Scientific School of L.I. Mandelshtam.''* Y.L. Alpert
''Curriculum Vitae (PDF file). ''* Lev Pitaevskii
Appreciation in Physics Reports 339, 2001.Obituaryin American Geophysical Union, SPA Section Newsletter 17 (Issue 77), 2010.
*
Obituaryin Physics-Uspekhi 54 (Issue 5), 2011 (in Russian)
Translationto English.
Obituaryin Boston Globe, October 17, 2010.
{{DEFAULTSORT:Alpert, Yakov Lvovich
1911 births
2010 deaths
Nuclear physicists
Soviet physicists
20th-century American physicists
Jewish Russian physicists
Ukrainian Jews
Refuseniks
Soviet emigrants to the United States