Boris Yakovlevich Podolsky (Russian: Бори́с Я́ковлевич Подо́льский; June 29, 1896 – November 28, 1966) was a Russian-American physicist of Jewish descent, noted for his work with Albert Einstein and Nathan Rosen on entangled wave functions and the EPR paradox.
In a letter dated November 10, 1933, to Abraham Flexner, founding director of the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton, Einstein described Podolsky as "one of the most brilliant of the younger men who has worked and published with [Paul] Dirac." In 1935 Einstein and others at the Institute wrote letters of recommendation for Podolsky, addressed to Louis T. More, Dean of the Graduate School of the University of Cincinnati, in which Einstein wrote, "I am happy to be able to tell you that I estimate Podolsky's abilities very highly.. he is an independent investigator of unquestionable talent."[2] In 1935, Podolsky took a post as professor of mathematical physics at the University of Cincinnati. At the University of Cincinnati he was MS adviser to Chihiro Kikuchi,[3] and PhD adviser to Herman Branson[4] and Alex Green.[5] In 1961, he moved to Xavier University, Cincinnati, where he worked until his death in 1966.
In 1933, Podolsky and Lev Landau had the idea to write a textbook on electromagnetism beginning with special relativity and emphasizing theoretical postulates rather than experimental laws. This project did not come to fruition due to Podolsky's return to the United States, where he had immigrated in 1913. However, in the hands of Lev Landau and E. Lifshitz, the outline they produced became The Classical Theory of Fields (1951).[7] On the same basis, Podolsky and K. Kunz produced Fundamentals of Electrodynamics, Marcel Dekker Press (1969), to which Podolsky's son, Robert, contributed most of the questions at the end of each chapter.
Possible contact with Soviet spies during World War II
A 2009 book by John Earl Haynes, Harvey Klehr and Alexander Vassiliev, Spies: The Rise and Fall of the KGB in America, identifies Podolsky as a contact (QUANTUM) who met twice with Soviet secret services in 1942 and 1943.[8] The evidence for these contacts is somewhat indirect. Early during World War II, several VENONA cables identify a contact named QUANTUM who sought out Soviet intelligence in 1942 and asked for a position in the USSR to work on processing Uranium 235. A 1943 VENONA cable shows QUANTUM provided relatively simple equations known as Graham's law of gaseous diffusion (known since 1848) which can be used to separate fissile U-235 from unwanted U-238.[9] QUANTUM was paid $300 for this information according to a VENONA cable.[10] The Soviets never contacted him again because they felt QUANTUM was unreliable.[11][12] A former KGB officer named Alexander Vassiliev took notes from the KGB archive after the fall of the USSR which suggested that QUANTUM was Podolsky.[13]
In popular culture
Podolsky is played by the actor Gene Saks in the 1994 Hollywood film I.Q.
^Pais, Nach Abraham (November 3, 2005). Subtle Is the Lord: The Science and the Life of Albert Einstein. Oxford University Press. p. 494. ISBN978-0192806727.
