46 Facts About Andrei Sakharov

Andrei Dmitrievich Sakharov was a Soviet physicist and a Nobel Peace Prize laureate, which he was awarded in 1975 for emphasizing human rights around the world.

Andrei 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 dissident and faced persecution from the Soviet establishment.

Andrei Dmitrievich Sakharov was born in Moscow on 21 May 1921, to a Russian family.

Andrei Sakharov's father, Dmitri Ivanovich Sakharov, was a physics professor at the Second Moscow State University and an amateur pianist.

Andrei Sakharov's grandfather, Ivan, was a lawyer in the former Russian Empire who had displayed respect for social awareness and humanitarian principles.

Andrei Sakharov's mother, Yekaterina Alekseevna Sofiano, was a daughter of Aleksey Semenovich Sofiano, a general in the Tsarist Russian Army with Greek heritage.

Andrei 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.

Andrei Sakharov realised that in order to cause the explosion of one side of the fuel to symmetrically compress the fusion fuel, a mirror could be used to reflect the radiation.

Andrei Sakharov never felt that by creating nuclear weapons he had "known sin", in Oppenheimer's expression.

Andrei Sakharov later suggested replacing the copper coil in MK generators with a large superconductor solenoid to magnetically compress and focus underground nuclear explosions into a shaped charge effect.

Andrei Sakharov tried to explain the baryon asymmetry of the universe; in that regard, he was the first to give a theoretical motivation for proton decay.

Andrei Sakharov was the first to consider CPT-symmetric events occurring before the Big Bang:.

Andrei Sakharov was interested in explaining why the curvature of the universe is so small.

In those models, after a certain number of cycles the curvature naturally becomes infinite even if it had not started this way: Andrei 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.

Andrei 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.

Andrei Sakharov proposed the idea of induced gravity as an alternative theory of quantum gravity.

Since the late 1950s Andrei Sakharov had become concerned about the moral and political implications of his work.

Politically active during the 1960s, Andrei Sakharov was against nuclear proliferation.

Andrei Sakharov was involved in an event with political consequences in 1964, when the Soviet Academy of Sciences nominated for full membership Nikolai Nuzhdin, a follower of Trofim Lysenko.

In 1966 Andrei Sakharov was one of the signatories on the Letter of the Twenty Five regarding the inadmissibility of "partial or indirect rehabilitation of Joseph Stalin".

Andrei Sakharov asked permission to publish his manuscript, which accompanied the letter, in a newspaper to explain the dangers posed by that kind of defense.

In May 1968, Andrei Sakharov completed an essay, "Reflections on Progress, Peaceful Coexistence, and Intellectual Freedom".

Andrei Sakharov described the anti-ballistic missile defense as a major threat of world nuclear war.

For 12 years, until his exile to Gorky in January 1980, Andrei Sakharov assumed the role of a widely recognized and open dissident in Moscow.

Andrei Sakharov 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.

Andrei Sakharov married a fellow human rights activist, Yelena Bonner, in 1972.

Andrei Sakharov appealed to the US Congress to approve the 1974 Jackson-Vanik Amendment to a trade bill, which coupled trade tariffs to the Kremlin's willingness to allow freer emigration for Soviet Jews.

In 1972, Andrei Sakharov became the target of sustained pressure from his fellow scientists in the Soviet Academy of Sciences and the Soviet press.

Andrei 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.

In 1973, Andrei Sakharov was nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize, and in 1974, he was awarded the Prix mondial Cino Del Duca.

Andrei Sakharov was not allowed to leave the Soviet Union to collect the prize.

Andrei Sakharov included a list of prisoners of conscience and political prisoners in the Soviet Union and stated that he shared the prize with them.

Andrei Sakharov was arrested on 22 January 1980, following his public protests against the Soviet intervention in Afghanistan in 1979, and was sent to the city of Gorky, now Nizhny Novgorod, a city that was off limits to foreigners.

Between 1980 and 1986, Andrei Sakharov was kept under Soviet police surveillance.

Andrei Sakharov was named the 1980 Humanist of the Year by the American Humanist Association.

Andrei Sakharov again was taken to a hospital and force-fed.

Andrei Sakharov remained in the hospital until October 1985, when his wife was allowed to travel to the United States.

Andrei Sakharov had heart surgery in the United States and returned to Gorky in June 1986.

On 19 December 1986, Mikhail Gorbachev, who had initiated the policies of perestroika and glasnost, called Andrei Sakharov to tell him that he and his wife could return to Moscow.

In 1988, Andrei Sakharov was given the International Humanist Award by the International Humanist and Ethical Union.

Andrei Sakharov helped to initiate the first independent legal political organizations and became prominent in the Soviet Union's growing political opposition.

In March 1989, Andrei Sakharov was elected to the new parliament, the All-Union Congress of People's Deputies and co-led the democratic opposition, the Inter-Regional Deputies Group.

In December 1988, Andrei Sakharov visited Armenia and Azerbaijan on a fact-finding mission.

Andrei Sakharov's wife went to wake him at 11 pm as he had requested but she found Sakharov dead on the floor.

Andrei Sakharov was interred in the Vostryakovskoye Cemetery in Moscow.

In 1980, Andrei Sakharov was stripped of all Soviet awards for "anti-Soviet activities".