This book tells captivating stories of misadventures of two
renowned theoretical physicists in the Soviet Union. The first part
is devoted to Friedrich (Fritz) Houtermans, an outstanding
Dutch-Austrian-German physicist who was the first to suggest that
the source of stars' energy is thermonuclear fusion, and also made
a number of other important contributions to cosmochemistry and
geochemistry. In 1935, Houtermans, a German communist, in an
attempt to save his life from Hilter's Gestapo, fled to the Soviet
Union. He took up an appointment at the Kharkov Physico-Technical
Institute, working there for two years with the Russian physicist
Valentin P Fomin. In the Great Purge of 1937, Houtermans was
arrested in December by the NKVD (Soviet Secret Police, KGB's
predecessor). He was tortured, and confessed to being a Trotskyist
plotter and German spy, out of fear of threats against his wife
Charlotte. However, Charlotte had already escaped from the Soviet
Union to Denmark, after which she went to England and finally the
USA. As a result of the Hilter-Stalin Pact of 1939, Houtermans was
turned over to the Gestapo in May 1940 and imprisoned in Berlin.The
second part consists of two essays that narrate the life story of
Yuri Golfand, one of the codiscoverers of supersymmetry, a major
discovery in theoretical physics in the 20th century. In 1973, just
two years after the publication of his seminal paper, he was fired
from the Lebedev Physics Institute in Moscow. Because of his Jewish
origin he could find no job. Under such circumstances, he applied
for an exit visa to Israel, but his application was denied. Yuri
Golfand became a refusnik and joined the Human rights movement,
along with two other prominent physicists, Andrei Sakharov and Yuri
Orlov. To earn his living, he had to do manual work, repeatedly
being intimidated by KGB. Only 18 years later, shortly before the
demise of the Soviet Union, did he obtain permission to leave the
country, emigrating to Israel in 1990.These personal life stories
of two outstanding theorists are interwined with the tragedies of
the 20th century and make for compelling reading.
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