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I recently became interested in a russian scientist named Zel'dovitch but was unable to find any information on line. I discovered that he is a great and important scientist and decided that there should be a web page about him. So, although he is NOT a member of the Astrochemistry lab here is our page about him.

Born in Minsk on March 18, 1914, self taught, Dr. Zel'dovitch (Yakov, Borisovich) was one of the great russian scientists of the last century. Dr. Zeldovitch did significant work in the fields of theoretical and relativistic astrophysics. There is a Zeldovitch factor, (a correction to the equilibrium equation for nucleation that is typically of order 0.1) and a Sunyaev-Zeldovitch effect in the clustering of galaxies, which I am told is of great importance in understanding the grand structures of the universe and the fundamentals of cosmology. He is well known for his work on the origin of the magnetic poles of stars and galaxies, and for the theory of the magnetic dynamo. He wrote many books and won many awards including the Lenin prize. In addition to being a member of the Soviet Academy of Sciences he was also a member of the American Academy and the Royal British Academy, and he recieved the gold medal from the Royal Astronomical Society.

During the 1930s and 40s at theInstitute of Chemical Physics Dr. Zel'dovitch studied the chemistry and physics of explosions and combustion, including the formation of NO_x compounds in exhaust gases of transport engines. The NASA library system has books from the early 1950's by him on flame propagation, the combusion of initially unmixed gases and propagation and detonation in gaseous systems. He worked for a time at Arzamas (sort of the Soviet Los Alamos) where he participated in early work on the mechanism of fission during the radioactive decay of uranium, and the role of slow neutrons in the fission process. He then went on to the Institute of General Physics where he worked on cosmology.

From the Biographical Dictionary of Scientists (David Abbott editor) I have stolen this...

"It was in the 50s that he began to develop an interest in cosmology and since then Zel'dovitch's writings have dealt with such diverse subjects as quark annihilation, neutrino detections, and the applicability of relativistic versus Newtonian theories to the study of the expanding and evolving Universe and the earliest stages of the Universe - the quantum, hadron, and lepton eras. In 1967, together with C.W. Misher, A.G. Doroshkevich, and I.D. Novikov, he proposed that in its initial stages the Universe was highly isotropic, but that as it has expanded, this isotropy has diminished."