George Volkoff

George Michael Volkoff, (February 23, 1914 – April 24, 2000) was a Russian-Canadian physicist and academic who helped, with J. Robert Oppenheimer, predict the existence of neutron stars before they were discovered.

Early life He was born in Moscow, Russia, in 1914. His father, an engineer, relocated his family to Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada in 1924. Unable to find work, his father moved the family again to Harbin, Manchuria, in 1927 to teach at a Russian technical school. In 1936, after Volkoff's mother died, his father returned to Russia but found himself a victim of Joseph Stalin's Great Purge. He was exiled to the arctic camps where he would die.

Education and academic work Volkoff returned to Vancouver in 1930 and attended the University of British Columbia, receiving a bachelor's degree in physics in 1934 and a master's degree in 1936. He then studied with J. Robert Oppenheimer at the University of California, Berkeley. At this time, Oppenheimer became interested in relativistic astrophysics, in particular, the stability of compact objects. As was typical, Oppenheimer worked with a student in his investigations. For the topic of neutron stars, he picked Volkoff. Together, they published the paper "On Massive Neutron Cores" in 1939. This was Volkoff's first and most famous scientific contribution. They showed that the maximum mass of a neutron star must be between one half and several solar masses. By the 1990s, astronomers had catalogued hundreds of these objects, and their maximum mass was thought to be between 1.5 and 3 solar masses, in the same order of magnitude as the original calculation by Tolman, Oppenheimer, and Volkoff.

Volkoff earned his Ph.D. in 1940 and subsequently undertook further research on nuclear physics with Eugene Wigner at Princeton University. He facilitated the development of high-energy physics in Canada and was an early proponent of the Tri-University Meson Facility (TRIUMF).

He died in Vancouver in 2000, following a series of strokes that began in 1996.