Pyotr Kapitsa was a leading Soviet physicist and Nobel laureate, best known for his work in low-temperature physics.
Background
Kapitsa was born on July 8, 1894, in Kronstadt, Russian Empire to Bessarabian-Volhynian-born parents Leonid Petrovich Kapitsa, a military engineer who constructed fortifications, and Olga Ieronimovna Kapitsa from a noble Polish Stebnicki family. Besides Russian, the Kapitsa family also spoke Romanian.
Education
Educated at the Polytechnic Institute in Petrograd (now St. Petersburg), he completed his studies in 1918. In 1921 he went to Cambridge University and worked with Ernest Rutherford.
Career
Kapitsa rose steadily in Cambridge University, becoming a professor, a Fellow of the Royal Society, and director of the Royal Society's Mond Laboratory. In 1934 Kapitsa returned to the Soviet Union for a visit and was not permitted to leave. He was made director of the Institute of Physical Problems and worked there until 1946. He was elected to the Soviet Academy of Sciences in 1939 and was awarded Stalin Prizes in 1941 and 1943. In 1946 Kapitsa was removed as director of the institute, and his activities during the ensuing nine years remain obscure. In 1955 he was restored to the directorship and made editor of the Journal of Experimental and Theoretical Physics, the leading physics journal in the Soviet Union. In later years, he criticized the strict dogmatic imposition of dialectical philosophy to physical phenomena, in the belief that it discouraged full development of Soviet science. Kapitsa was best known for his pioneering work in experimental low-temperature physics and in the development of apparatus for obtaining very intense magnetic fields; he achieved a field of 500, 000 gauss in 1924. In the low-temperature field, he developed a hydrogen liquefier in 1932, a helium liquefier in 1934, and an air liquefier of original design in 1939. Working with helium, in 1938 he discovered the extraordinary property of superfluidity; he later made a number of fundamental contributions to problems of heat transfer in that fluid. In 1978 he was awarded a share of the Nobel Prize in physics. He died in Moscow on April 8, 1984. Kapitsa ranked as one of the ablest experimentalists of his time. He gathered around him a distinguished group, including L. D. Landau, V. P. Peshkov, Y. M. Lifshits, and I. M. Khalatnikov, who helped him bring fame to Soviet work in low-temperature physics.
In November 1945, Kapitsa quarreled with Lavrentiy Beria, head of the NKVD and in charge of the Soviet atomic bomb project, writing to Joseph Stalin about Beria's ignorance of physics and his arrogance. Stalin backed Kapitsa, telling Beria he had to cooperate with the scientists. Kapitsa refused to meet Beria: "If you want to speak to me, then come to the Institute. " Kapitsa refused to work with Beria even when Beria gave him a hunting rifle. Stalin offered to meet Kapitsa, but this never happened.
Membership
Member of the presidium of the Soviet Academy of Sciences, member of the United States National Academy of Sciences, fellow of the Royal Society (1929)
Connections
Kapitsa was married in 1927 to Anna Alekseevna Krylova (1903-1996), daughter of applied mathematician A. N. Krylov. They had two sons, Sergey and Andrey. Sergey Kapitsa (1928-2012) was a physicist and demographer. He was also the host of the popular and long-running Russian scientific TV show, Evident, but Incredible. Andrey Kapitsa (1931-2011) was a geographer. He was credited with the discovery and naming of Lake Vostok, the largest subglacial lake in Antarctica, which lies 4, 000 meters below the continent's ice cap.