R.I.P. Alexei Starobinsky (1948-2023)
I’m very sorry, especially just before Christmas, to pass on the news of the death of Russian physicist and cosmologist Alexei Starobinsky who died yesterday (21st December 2023) of complications resulting from Covid-19. I heard this morning, but have been travelling all day and only just found time to write something in appreciation.
Starobinsky was one of the many academic descendants of the great Zeldovich; he did particularly important work on the physics of the early Universe in which field his ideas prefigured the theory that came to be known as cosmic inflation. Although Starobinsky’s seminal (1979) work on this topic was not well known outside the Soviet Union at the time Alan Guth wrote his paper on inflation (1981), it did later gained wider appreciation, and led to numerous awards, including the Gruber Prize in 2013 and the Kavli Prize in 2014 (together with Guth and Andrei Linde).
I do have one rather fond personal memory of Starobinsky, from when we were coincidentally both visiting IUCAA in Pune at the same time back in the Nineties. We ended up going on a shopping trip together during which he revealed himself to be hopeless at the kind of light-hearted haggling that was the norm in the places we visited. He ended up paying way over the odds for everything he bought. He didn’t seem to mind though, and apparently found it all quite amusing. I only met him a few times and didn’t get to know him well at all, but he struck me as a very nice man as well as a fine physicist of the old-school Russian type.
Rest in peace, Alexei Alexandrovich Starobinsky (1948-2023).
In the Dark 
December 24, 2023 at 5:32 am
Nearly 6 months ago we made an award to Alexei Starobinsky, together with Katsuhiko Sato, as the centre piece of a conference held in Korea. Being the native English speaker on the award committee, I wrote the press release:
https://www.apctp.org/theme/d/html/activities/activities01_read-pop.php?id=1801&m_id=454
As Alexei was unable to leave Russia, due to the Ukraine war, we had been hoping to present the award at a special function – in 2024, if world events allowed it. Sadly, we now have to revisit those plans.
Our 3 July 2023 press release also carried a powerful political message, which despite much effort, we were unable to get any news agency to take up. By a coincidence of timing, the symbolism could not have been more poignant. One laureate, Starobinsky, had signed an open letter in 2022 condemning the invarion of Ukraine, but could not now travel from Russia. The other, Sato, is a citizen of Japan, the one country which has experienced nuclear attack. The conference was held in the powder keg of the Korean peninsula, and the press release was written just after the 23 June 2023 Wagner Group rebellion in Russia vividly demonstrated how unstable the world has become. Nuclear risk has only increased with proliferation… And many of us cosmologists, general relativists and particle astrophysicists were active in Pugwash in the 1980s, which received the Nobel Peace Prize in 1995 for its role in ending the Cold War.
News agencies, like every organization are short staffed and overwhelmed. They exist on skeleton crews when the northern hemisphere summer is in full swing. Back in July the newsrooms already had pre-written stories timed to coincide with the release of the Oppenheimer movie. Trying to speak up about the increased imminent risks is difficult today, in a world that seems to have forgotten about Jospeh (Józef) Rotblat, Pugwash and the 1995 Peace Prize.
Whatever we do remember Alexei Starobinsky for, the physics reason for our award should not be forgotten. He established the role of gravitational wave production in cosmic inflation and his 1979 model made a prediction which still remains phenomenologically correct.
I will now state my own personal view, rather than that of the ICGAC award committee. Whereas a number of models of cosmic inflation have bitten the dust – quite literally in the case of an infamous announcement from BICEP in 2014 – it is important that we do not remember Alexei Alexandrovich simply as “one of the pioneers of cosmic inflation” but as the one whose simple model got something right, unlike others.
In my view, inflation is a phenomenology in search of a fundamental theory. That theory, an as yet to emerge theory of quantum gravity, involves fundamental questions including: What is the origin of scale? How is the symmetry of a scale-free gravity theory broken, geometrically? While the Starobinsky model is by no means fundamental, and while quantum gravity is still some way off, Alexei Starobinsky did hit upon a link between gravitational wave production in the very early Universe and these fundamental questions.
For that important basic insight, I raise my glass this Christmas to Alexei Alexandrovich.