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Andrei Dmitrievich Sakharov (; 21 May 192114 December 1989) was a Soviet physicist and a Nobel Peace Prize laureate, which he was awarded in 1975 for emphasizing human rights around the world.
Although he spent his career in physics in the Soviet program of nuclear weapons, overseeing the development of thermonuclear weapons, Sakharov also did fundamental work in understanding particle physics, magnetism, and physical cosmology. Sakharov is mostly known for his political activism for individual freedom, human rights, civil liberties and reforms in the Soviet Union, for which he was deemed a Soviet dissident and faced persecution from the Soviet establishment.
In his memory, the Sakharov Prize was established and is awarded annually by the European Parliament for people and organizations dedicated to human rights and freedoms.
Sakharov's parents and paternal grandmother, Maria Petrovna, largely shaped his personality; his mother and grandmother were members of the Russian Orthodox Church, although his father was a non-believer. When Andrei was about thirteen, he realized that he did not believe in God. However, despite being an atheist, (2025). 9780195156201, Oxford University Press. ISBN 9780195156201 he did believe in a "guiding principle" that transcends the physical laws. (2015). 9780817918965, Hoover Press. ISBN 9780817918965
After schooling, Sakharov studied physics at the Moscow State University in 1938 and, following evacuation in 1941 during the Eastern Front with Nazi Germany, he graduated in Aşgabat in Turkmenistan. In 1943, he married Klavdia Alekseyevna Vikhireva, with whom he raised two daughters and a son. They were married until Klavdia's death in 1969. In 1945, he joined the Theoretical Department of Physical Institute of the Russian Academy of Sciences under Igor Tamm in Moscow. In 1947, Sakharov was successful in defending his thesis for the Doctor of Sciences (lit. Doktor Nauk), which covered the topic of nuclear transmutation.
Sakharov saw "striking parallels" between his fate and those of J. Robert Oppenheimer and Edward Teller in the US. Sakharov believed that in this "tragic confrontation of two outstanding people", both deserved respect, because "each of them was certain he had right on his side and was morally obligated to go to the end in the name of truth." While Sakharov strongly disagreed with Teller over nuclear testing in the atmosphere and the Strategic Defense Initiative, he believed that American academics had been unfair to Teller's resolve to get the H-bomb for the United States since "all steps by the Americans of a temporary or permanent rejection of developing thermonuclear weapons would have been seen either as a clever feint, or as the manifestation of stupidity. In both cases, the reaction would have been the same – avoid the trap and immediately take advantage of the enemy's stupidity."
Sakharov never felt that by creating nuclear weapons he had "known sin", in Oppenheimer's expression. He later wrote:
Sakharov then tested a MK-driven "plasma cannon" where a small aluminum ring was vaporized by huge into a stable, self-confined torus plasmoid and was accelerated to 100 km/s. Sakharov later suggested replacing the copper coil in MK generators with a large superconductor solenoid to magnetically compress and focus Nuclear testing into a shaped charge effect. He theorized this could focus 1023 per second on a 1 mm2 surface.
We can visualize that neutral spinless maximons (or photons) are produced at ''t'' < 0 from contracting matter having an excess of antiquarks, that they pass "one through the other" at the instant ''t'' = 0 when the density is infinite, and decay with an excess of quarks when ''t'' > 0, realizing total CPT symmetry of the universe. All the phenomena at t < 0 are assumed in this hypothesis to be CPT reflections of the phenomena at t > 0. Translated as: Republished asHis legacy in this domain are the famous conditions named after him: Baryon number violation, C-symmetry and CP-symmetry violation, and interactions out of thermal equilibrium.
Sakharov was also interested in explaining why the curvature of the universe is so small. This led him to consider cyclic models, where the universe oscillates between contraction and expansion phases. Translated as: Translated as: In those models, after a certain number of cycles the curvature naturally becomes infinite even if it had not started this way: Sakharov considered three starting points, a flat universe with a slightly negative cosmological constant, a universe with a positive curvature and a zero cosmological constant, and a universe with a negative curvature and a slightly negative cosmological constant. Those last two models feature what Sakharov calls a reversal of the time arrow, which can be summarized as follows: He considers times t > 0 after the initial Big Bang singularity at t = 0 (which he calls "Friedman singularity" and denotes Φ) as well as times t < 0 before that singularity. He then assumes that entropy increases when time increases for t > 0 as well as when time decreases for t < 0, which constitutes his reversal of time. Then he considers the case when the universe at t < 0 is the image of the universe at t > 0 under CPT symmetry but also the case when it is not so: the universe has a non-zero CPT charge at t = 0 in this case. Sakharov considers a variant of this model where the reversal of the time arrow occurs at a point of maximum entropy instead of happening at the singularity. In those models there is no dynamic interaction between the universe at t < 0 and t > 0.
In his first model the two universes did not interact, except via local matter accumulation whose density and pressure become high enough to connect the two sheets through a bridge without spacetime between them, but with a continuity of geodesics beyond the Schwarzschild radius with no singularity, allowing an exchange of matter between the two conjugated sheets, based on an idea after Igor Dmitriyevich Novikov. Novikov called such singularities a collapse and an anticollapse, which are an alternative to the couple black hole and white hole in the wormhole model. Sakharov also proposed the idea of induced gravity as an alternative theory of quantum gravity.
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Sakharov was also involved in an event with political consequences in 1964, when the Soviet Academy of Sciences nominated for full membership , a follower of Trofim Lysenko (initiator of the Stalin-supported anti-genetics campaign Lysenkoism). Contrary to normal practice, Sakharov, a member of the academy, publicly spoke out against full membership for Nuzhdin and held him responsible for "the defamation, firing, arrest, even death, of many genuine scientists." In the end, Nuzhdin was not elected, but the episode prompted Nikita Khrushchev to order the KGB to gather kompromat on Sakharov. In 1966 Sakharov was one of the signatories on the Letter of the Twenty Five regarding the inadmissibility of "partial or indirect rehabilitation of Joseph Stalin".
The major turn in Sakharov's political evolution came in 1967, when anti-ballistic missile defense became a key issue in US–Soviet relations. In a secret detailed letter to the Soviet leadership of July 21, 1967, Sakharov explained the need to "take the Americans at their word" and accept their proposal for a "bilateral rejection by the USA and the Soviet Union of the development of antiballistic missile defense" because an arms race in the new technology would otherwise increase the likelihood of nuclear war. He also asked permission to publish his manuscript, which accompanied the letter, in a newspaper to explain the dangers posed by that kind of defense. The government ignored his letter and refused to let him initiate a public discussion of ABMs in the Soviet press.Gennady Gorelik. The Metamorphosis of Andrei Sakharov. Scientific American, 1999, March.Web exhibit "Andrei SAKHAROV: Soviet Physics, Nuclear Weapons, and Human Rights" at American Institute of Physics [1]
Since 1967, after the Six-Day War and the beginning of the Arab-Israeli conflict, he actively supported Israel, as he reported more than once in the press, and also maintained friendly relations with who later made aliyah.
In May 1968, Sakharov completed an essay, "Reflections on Progress, Peaceful Coexistence, and Intellectual Freedom". He described the anti-ballistic missile defense as a major threat of world nuclear war. After the essay was circulated in samizdat and then published outside the Soviet Union,Initially on July 6, 1968, in the Dutch newspaper Het Parool through the intermediary of the Dutch academic and writer Karel van het Reve, followed by The New York Times: Sakharov was banned from conducting any military-related research and returned to FIAN to study fundamental theoretical physics.
For 12 years, until his exile to Gorky (Nizhny Novgorod) in January 1980, Sakharov assumed the role of a widely recognized and open dissident in Moscow. (2025). 9780300129373 ISBN 9780300129373 He stood vigil outside closed courtrooms, wrote appeals on behalf of more than 200 individual prisoners, and continued to write essays about the need for democratization.
In 1970, Sakharov was among the three founding members of the Committee on Human Rights in the USSR, along with Valery Chalidze and Andrei Tverdokhlebov. The Committee wrote appeals, collected signatures for petitions and succeeded in affiliating with several international human rights organizations. Its work was the subject of many KGB reports and brought Sakharov under increasing pressure from the government.
Sakharov married a fellow human rights activist, Yelena Bonner, in 1972. irishtimes.com
By 1973, Sakharov was meeting regularly with Western correspondents and holding press conferences in his apartment. He appealed to the US Congress to approve the 1974 Jackson-Vanik Amendment to a trade bill, which linked trade tariffs to the Kremlin's willingness to allow freer emigration for Soviet Jews.
In 1973 and 1974, the Soviet media campaign continued, targeting both Sakharov and Solzhenitsyn for their pro-Western, anti-socialist positions.
Sakharov later described that it took "years" for him to "understand how much substitution, deceit, and lack of correspondence with reality there was" in the Soviet ideals. "At first I thought, despite everything that I saw with my own eyes, that the Soviet State was a breakthrough into the future, a kind of prototype for all countries". Then he came, in his words, to "the theory of symmetry: all governments and regimes to a first approximation are bad, all peoples are oppressed, and all are threatened by common dangers.":
Sakharov's ideas on social development led him to put forward the principle of human rights as a new basis of all politics. In his works, he declared that "the principle 'what is not prohibited is allowed' should be understood literally", and defied what he saw as unwritten ideological rules imposed by the Communist Party on the society in spite of a democratic Soviet Constitution (1936):
In a letter written from exile, he cheered up a fellow physicist and free market advocate with the words: "Fortunately, the future is unpredictable and also – because of quantum effects – uncertain." For Sakharov, the indeterminacy of the future supported his belief that he could and should take personal responsibility for it.
Sakharov was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 1975. The Norwegian Nobel Committee called him "a spokesman for the conscience of mankind". In the words of the Nobel Committee's citation: "In a convincing manner Sakharov has emphasised that Man's inviolable rights provide the only safe foundation for genuine and enduring international cooperation."
Sakharov was not allowed to leave the Soviet Union to collect the prize. His wife, Yelena Bonner, read his speech at the ceremony in Oslo, Norway.Y.B. Sakharov: Acceptance Speech, Nobel Peace Prize, Oslo, Norway, December 10, 1975.Y.B. Sakharov: Peace, Progress, Human Rights, Sakharov's Nobel Lecture, Nobel Peace Prize, Oslo, Norway, December 11, 1975. On the day the prize was awarded, Sakharov was in Vilnius, where the human rights activist Sergei Kovalev was being tried. In his Nobel lecture, "Peace, Progress, Human Rights", Sakharov called for an end to the arms race, greater respect for the environment, international cooperation, and universal respect for human rights. He included a list of prisoners of conscience and political prisoners in the Soviet Union and stated that he shared the prize with them.
By 1976, the head of the KGB, Yuri Andropov, was prepared to call Sakharov "Domestic Enemy Number One" before a group of KGB officers.
Between 1980 and 1986, Sakharov was kept under Soviet police surveillance. In his memoirs, he mentioned that their apartment in Gorky was repeatedly subjected to searches and heists. Sakharov was named the 1980 Humanist of the Year by the American Humanist Association.
In May 1984, Sakharov's wife, Yelena Bonner, was detained, and Sakharov began a hunger strike, demanding permission for his wife to travel to the United States for heart surgery. He was forcibly hospitalized and forced feeding. He was held in isolation for four months. In August 1984, Bonner was sentenced by a court to five years of exile in Gorky.
In April 1985, Sakharov started a new hunger strike for his wife to travel abroad for medical treatment. He again was taken to a hospital and force-fed. In August, the Politburo discussed what to do about Sakharov. He remained in the hospital until October 1985, when his wife was allowed to travel to the United States. She had heart surgery in the United States and returned to Gorky in June 1986.
In December 1985, the European Parliament established the Sakharov Prize for Freedom of Thought, to be given annually for outstanding contributions to human rights.
On 19 December 1986, Mikhail Gorbachev, who had initiated the policies of perestroika and glasnost, called Sakharov to tell him that he and his wife could return to Moscow.
In December 1988, Sakharov visited Armenia and Azerbaijan on a fact-finding mission. He concluded, "For Azerbaijan the issue of Karabakh is a matter of ambition, for the Armenians of Karabakh, it is a matter of life and death".
An Andrei Sakharov prize has also been awarded by the American Physical Society every second year since 2006 "to recognize outstanding leadership and/or achievements of scientists in upholding human rights".
The Andrei Sakharov Prize for Writer's Civic Courage was established in October 1990. "For Writer's Civic Courage" , Literaturnaya Gazeta, October 31, 1990
In 2004, with the approval of Yelena Bonner, an annual Sakharov Prize for journalism was established for reporters and commentators in Russia. Funded by former Soviet dissident Pyotr Vins, now a businessman in the US, the prize is administered by the Glasnost Defence Foundation in Moscow. The prize "for journalism as an act of conscience" has been won over the years by famous journalists such as Anna Politkovskaya and young reporters and editors working far from Russia's media capital, Moscow. The 2015 winner was Yelena Kostyuchenko.
Most of documents of the archive are letters from the head of the KGB to the Central Committee about activities of Soviet dissidents and recommendations about the interpretation in newspapers. The letters cover the period from 1968 to 1991 (Brezhnev stagnation). The documents characterize not only Sakharov's activity, but that of other dissidents, as well as that of highest-position and the KGB. No Russian equivalent of the KGB archive is available.
In 1980, Sakharov was stripped of all Soviet awards for "anti-Soviet activities". Later, during glasnost, he declined the return of his awards and, consequently, Mikhail Gorbachev did not sign the necessary decree.Gennady Gorelik, The World Of Andrei Sakharov, (Oxford: Oxford U. Press) 2005, pp. xv, 351-355
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