Somewhere we should start a Hall of Fame for those who had the courage to take the ill will from the enforcers of the “new religion” of global warming. Among its honorees would be Michael Crichton, Freeman Dyson, and (see below) Ivar Giaever. Science is not a body of doctrine; science is a process of inquiry.
(p. B12) Ivar Giaever might not have won the Nobel Prize in Physics if a job recruiter at General Electric had known the difference between the educational grading systems of the United States and Norway.
It was 1956, and he was applying for a position at the General Electric Research Laboratory in Schenectady, N.Y. The interviewer looked at his grades, from the Norwegian Institute of Technology in Trondheim, where Dr. Giaever had studied mechanical engineering, and was impressed: The young applicant had scored 4.0 marks in math and physics. The recruiter congratulated him.
But what the recruiter didn’t know was that in Norway, the best grade was a 1.0, not a 4.0, the top grade in American schools. In fact, a 4.0 in Norway was barely passing — something like a D on American report cards. In reality, his academic record in Norway had been anything but impressive.
He did not want to be dishonest, Dr. Giaever (pronounced JAY-ver) would say in recounting the episode with some amusement over the years, but he also did not correct the interviewer. He got the job.
He proceeded to spend the next 32 years at the laboratory, along the way developing an experiment that provided proof of a central idea in quantum physics — that subatomic particles can behave like powerful waves.
. . .
Though Dr. Giaever later earned a doctorate in theoretical physics, in 1964, from Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in Troy, N.Y., he had not yet completed that degree when he came up with the experiment that would earn him his share of the Nobel. Indeed, as he admitted in his Nobel lecture, he did not fully understand the ideas behind the experiment when he first started working on it. He was, after all, a mechanical engineer, steeped in how things work in classical physics, which deals with real-world objects. Quantum physics, on the other hand, predicts what happens in the weird subatomic world.
. . .
Dr. Giaever prided himself on his common-sense approach to science, but not all his ideas were welcomed by his peers. He became a prominent denier of climate change, referring to the science around it as a “new religion.” (“I would say that, basically, global warming is a nonproblem,” he said in a 2015 speech.) He based his opposition, in part, on his belief that it is impossible to track changes in the Earth’s temperature and that, even if it could be done, the temperature changes would be insignificant.
When the American Physical Society announced in 2011 that the evidence for climate change and global warming was incontrovertible, he resigned from the society in disgust, saying: “‘Incontrovertible’ is not a scientific word. Nothing is incontrovertible in science.”
For the full obituary, see:
(Note: ellipses added.)
(Note: the online version of the obituary was updated July 9, 2025, and has the title “Ivar Giaever, Nobel Winner in Quantum Physics, Dies at 96.”)