Giaever was born in Bergen, Norway, on April 5, 1929. He earned a degree in mechanical engineering at the Norwegian Institute of Technology in 1952. After serving a year in the Norwegian army and a year as a government patent examiner, Giaever emigrated to Canada. There he worked for the General Electric Company. In 1956 he moved to General Electric's Research and Development Center in Schenectady, New York. In 1964, after six years of night school classes, he received his Ph.D. in physics from Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute.

In 1973, Giaever shared the Nobel Prize for physics with Brian Josephson and Leo Esaki for research on tunneling in superconductors. According to classical physics, no current should flow between two metals separated by a nonconductor. The nonconductor represents an "energy barrier" through which current can flow only if electrons that make up the current have more energy than does the barrier.

The theory of quantum...