Iosif Shklovsky - Personal Life

Personal Life

His memoir, Five Billion Vodka Bottles to the Moon: Tales of a Soviet Scientist, was published posthumously in 1991 by W.W. Norton & Co.

In “Five Billion Vodka Bottles to the Moon,” Shklovsky recalled his visit to Philip Morrison, who in 1959 had co-authored with Cornell University colleague Giuseppe Cocconi the paper in Nature magazine which marks the beginning of the modern search for extraterrestrial life, and their discussion of such issues. Bitter over Soviet anti-semitism, of the five pioneer investigators of the field, Cocconi, Morrison, Cornell University's Frank Drake (of the 1961 Project Ozma and the Drake equation), Sagan, and Shklovsky, Shklovsky was quite aware of sharing his Jewish identity with both Morrison and Sagan. Indeed, Sagan's Jewish heritage was also Ukrainian Jewish.

He was known for his sharp wit and extreme likability. Colleagues in the astronomy department at the University of California, Berkeley, remember fondly his visit there in the 1970s. Well known for his "Intelligent Life in the Universe," he was asked by a graduate student if UFO sightings are as common in the Soviet Union as in the United States. "No," he replied. "In this area the Americans are far more advanced than us."