Igor Dmitriyevich Novikov
Igor Dmitrievich Novikov () (born
November 10,
1935) is a
Russian theoretical astrophysicist and
cosmologist.
Novikov formulated the
Novikov self-consistency principle in the mid-1980s, an important contribution to the theory of
time travel.
Novikov gained his Ph. D in astrophysics in
1965 and Doctoral Degree in astrophysics in
1970. From
1974 to
1990 he was head of the Department of Relativistic Astrophysics at the Space Research Institute in
Moscow. Before
1991 he was head of the Department of Theoretical Astrophysics at the
Lebedev Physical Institute in Moscow and has been professor at Moscow State University. Since
1994 has been director of the Theoretical Astrophysics Center (TAC) of the
University of Copenhagen,
Denmark. He is currently also a professor of
astrophysics at the Observatory of the University of Copenhagen, where he has been since
1991. From
1998 he is a Fellow of the
Royal Astronomical Society.
Novikov is married to Eleonora Kotok and has two children, Elena and Dimitry. His father disappeared under
Stalin and his mother spent years in the
gulag. He eventually came under the wing of
Yakov Borisovich Zel'dovich.
He wrote several popular books with a huge self-evident fascination, similar to ones of
Stephen Hawking:
*
Black Holes and the Universe, (translated by Vitaly I. Kisin, Cambridge University Press
1995)
*
The River of Time, (translated by Vitaly I. Kisin, Cambridge University Press
1998,
2001)
*
Il Ritmo del Tempo, Di Renzo Editore, Roma, 2006
He has authored or co-authored 15 books on cosmology and astrophysics, and wrote, with Alexander S. Sharov, a biography of
Edwin Hubble,
E. Hubble, Life and Work (Cambridge University Press
1992).
