Correspondence

摘要

Russia has just issued a postage stamp to mark the centenary of the birth of the brilliant physicist and cosmologist Yakov Zeldovich (1914-87). Among his many achievements, and despite never having received a university degree, Zel'dovich developed the theories of nuclear chain reactions and of the gravitational lens (see R. A. Sunyaev (ed.) Zel'dovich: Reminiscences Chapman & Hall/CRC; 2004). As a theoretician, he was involved in the creation of Soviet nuclear weapons-the atomic bomb in 1949, with Lev Landau, and the hydrogen bomb in 1953, with Andrei Sakharov. Like Robert Oppenheimer in the United States, he met with government opposition when he declined to continue working on weapons development. Moving over to astrophysics, Zel'dovich made seminal contributions in gravitational instabilities and in cosmological fluctuations, with the Sunyaev-Zel'dovich effect being among the best known. In 2001, an asteroid, 11438 Zel'dovich, was named in his honour.