If you meet drivers who bought an expensive car and ask them about their car, they will talk for hours about its advantages and multifunctional capabilities. If you ask someone who bought a new computer about their computer, they will tell you about its power and capabilities. If you ask a gardener about his garden or greenhouses, he will tell you at length about the quantity and quality of his crops.
Abraham Alikhanian is widely recognized as one of the leading Soviet physicists who specialized in particle and nuclear physics. He also joined the atomic bomb project and led the development of heavy water reactors.
Alikhanian (Abram Alikhanov in Russian) was born on March 4, 1904, in Elizavetpol, the historical Armenian city of Gandzak (today Ganja, in Azerbaijan). His father was a railroad engineer in the Transcaucasus Railway. His younger brother Artem (1908-1978) was also a noted physicist. They had two sisters. His family lived in Alexandropol (today Gyumri) in 1912–13, where Alikhanian attended a commercial college. Then they moved to Tiflis (today Tbilisi), where they stayed until 1918, and returned to Alexandropol until the Turkish-Armenian war of 1920. After another move to Tiflis, he graduated from a commercial college in 1921.
