Pyotr Leonidovich Kapitsa was born on July 9, 1894, on Kronstadt, an island fortress near Saint Petersburg, capital of the Russian Empire. His father, Leonid Petrovich Kapitsa, was a colonel in the army's Engineering Corps. His mother, Olga Ieronimovna Stebnitskaia, was an academic folklore researcher.
At age 11, Pyotr began attending a classically oriented grammar school, however, he was hindered by his bad spelling - this quirk stayed with him all his life. After two years, his mother moved him to a technical school. Pyotr graduated in 1912 with high honors.
Lacking a classical education in Greek and Latin, Pyotr Kapitsa could not be admitted to a university. Instead, he studied Electrical Engineering at Saint Petersburg's Polytechnic Institute. His studies were interrupted by World War 1. In early 1915, at age 20, he volunteered as an ambulance driver on Russia's Polish front for a few months before resuming his studies.
Kapitsa graduated with a degree in Electrical Engineering in 1918, age 24. He continued at the Polytechnic Institute as a lecturer.
In 1921, at age 27, Kapitsa left Saint Petersburg to study for a doctoral degree with Ernest Rutherford at the University of Cambridge's renowned Cavendish Laboratory. Kapitsa received his Physics doctorate two years later.
He reveled in the quest for scientific truth at the Cavendish Laboratory, regarding the larger than life Rutherford as his scientific father. Rutherford recognized Kapitsa's outstanding skills as an experimental physicist and enjoyed his unconventional sense of humor. Both were eager that Kapitsa should continue with research at the Cavendish for many years.
Kapitsa thought young British scientists were too cautious about challenging the ideas of their more experienced colleagues. To improve matters, in 1922 he founded a weekly club bringing together the younger physicists to present their work informally. The club, known to everyone except Kapitsa himself as the Kapitsa Club, became very popular. Kapitsa and Paul Dirac became great friends.
Kapitsa prospered at Cambridge. In 1924, he was appointed as the Cavendish's assistant director of magnetic research. He developed techniques to produce ultra-powerful magnetic fields.
In 1928, he discovered that in a very strong magnetic field the electric resistance of various metals depends on the magnetic field strength, a straight-line relationship now known as Kapitsa's law of magnetoresistance. In 1930, Kapitsa was appointed director of Cambridge's Mond Laboratory, the Cavendish Lab's state-of-the-art offshoot, whose construction was completed in 1933.
Increasingly, Kapitsa turned his thoughts towards low-temperature research, where, in 1908, Heike Kamerlingh Onnes had made a significant breakthrough when he liquefied helium for the first time. At normal pressures, helium is liquid only at exceptionally low temperatures - within a few degrees of absolute zero. When Kamerlingh Onnes studied its properties, he noticed a peak in liquid helium's density at 2.19 K. This turned out to be a crucial phase transition called the lambda point, now measured to be 2.17 K. In 1933, Kapitsa developed a brilliant new process to liquefy helium based on cooling by volume expansion. He built a refrigeration machine in the Mond Laboratory that could liquefy helium at the astonishing rate of one liter per hour.
In 1934, Kapitsa returned to the Soviet Union for a conference. However, Joseph Stalin's Communist government was becoming increasingly paranoid. The Soviet Union's Great Terror had started. After Kapitsa arrived in Russia, officials canceled his exit visa and told him he would not be allowed to leave again. He was now trapped in the country. Show trials followed by executions of anyone whose actions were perceived to be un-Marxist or who was thought to be plotting against Stalin became common. Often there wasn't even a trial - people were simply murdered. Suspects were also sent on an industrial scale to Gulags - forced labor camps in which over a million people perished through brutal mistreatment.
Kapitsa was encouraged by officials to do physics, which he did, albeit at first in terrible despair. The Soviet government agreed to buy Kapitsa's equipment from the Mond Laboratory, and Rutherford arranged its shipment to Moscow. In 1935, Kapitsa accepted the job of head of the Institute of Physics of the Russian Academy of Sciences in Moscow.
In 1937, Kapitsa discovered superfluidity when he measured the flow of liquid helium through a tiny gap of 0.5 microns between two discs. He found that below the lambda temperature helium flowed astonishingly easily. He published his results in Nature on January 8, 1938, noting that: "Helium below the lambda point enters a special state that might be called a 'superfluid.'"
In the same edition of Nature, John Allen and Don Misener at Cambridge's Mond Laboratory announced their discovery of the same behavior in helium. They had measured the flow of helium through capillary tubes rather than between discs. Kapitsa, however, had priority. He submitted his paper on December 3, 1937. Allen and Misener's paper was submitted 19 days later.
In 1946, Kapitsa had a serious disagreement with Lavrentiy Beria, head of the notoriously brutal NKVD, whom Stalin had placed in charge of the Soviet nuclear weapons project. Kapitsa refused to work on the project for Beria. Beria made demands to Stalin that Kapitsa be killed, but Stalin would agree only to Kapitsa's removal from public life. Stalin was aware that Kapitsa had both a worldwide reputation and many influential friends in British science. Kapitsa returned to public life after Stalin's death in 1953. In the same year, Beria was executed for treason.
Despite receiving many invitations, for 30 years Kapitsa was refused permission to leave the Soviet Union for any purpose. This changed in 1965 when he was allowed to travel to Denmark to receive the Niels Bohr Gold Medal. This was one of a number of prestigious awards he received, including the Faraday Medal (1942), Franklin Medal (1944), Lomonosov Gold Medal (1959), Niels Bohr Gold Medal (1965), Rutherford Medal and Prize (1966), Nobel Prize in Physics (1978).
Pyotr Kapitsa died at age 89 on April 8, 1984, in Moscow. He was buried in the city's Novodevichy Cemetery.
Pyotr Kapitsa was a leading Soviet physicist who was jointly awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics 1978. Known for his notable contributions to the knowledge of atomic structures and understanding of strong magnetic fields at extremely low temperatures, he also conducted a series of experiments to study liquid helium, leading to the discovery of its superfluidity. He also developed a new method for liquefaction of air with a low-pressure cycle using a special high-efficiency expansion turbine.
A minor planet, 3437 Kapitsa, discovered by Soviet astronomer Lyudmila Georgievna Karachkina in 1982, is named in honor of Pyotr Kapitsa.
Kapitsa was an atheist and believed that science is the modern God.
Kapitza gained recognition not only for his scientific achievements but for his public activities as well. These activities, however, have received very different interpretations.
In the 1970s, official Soviet historians and the media portrayed Kapitza as a true Soviet scientist, honored by the government because his work had served the nation. Yet, at the same time, the anniversary article of Physics today carried the title "Pyotr Kapitza, octogenarian dissident."
Today, Soviet publicists often characterize Kapitza as a non-conformist opposed to Stalinism, a man who battled with the ruthless chief of the secret police, L.P. Beria, and was persecuted for his defiance.
Though these portraits of Kapitza diverge from the complicated reality, each one has some factual basis. Kapitza was a very influential and elite academician - he won the Orders of Lenin five times, the title of Hero of Socialist Labor twice, and the Stalin Prize twice. During the purges, he bravely defended persecuted scientists and saved several lives, including L.D. Landau's. And, in 1946, he was dismissed from all his official positions and disappeared from public view for several years.
In many respects Kapitsa was more British than Russian in his approach to science, believing that it should be free to question and probe, that it should be buttressed by experimentation and that it should be unfettered by political ideologies. In the article "Theory, Experiment, Practice" (1962), Kapitsa castigated the divergence between Soviet theoretical and experimental physicists, the ignorant application of dialectical materialism to science by Marxist philosophers who know little about science, and the general divorcement between theory and practice in Soviet science. In another piece, he insisted that science is an international enterprise and that international cooperation and contact are a necessity if science is to progress.
Respecting the future course of science, Kapitsa discussed in "The Future of Science" (1962) the tremendous challenge mankind faces in the conquest of outer space. He foresaw the use of nuclear energy to power space vehicles, the use of outer space for the disposal of dangerous radioactive waste products, and the easing of population pressure on earth through colonization of other planets. Turning to biology, Kapitsa believed that genetics can be extremely valuable if scientists can produce desired mutations.
Of special interest were Kapitsa's views on the social sciences. It was his opinion that the social sciences are at the same level of historical development that the natural sciences were during the Middle Ages, which in part explains the wide chasm between the natural and the social sciences; it is only with the emergence of the science of man's higher nervous activity that the social sciences have finally been provided with an empirical base. Being a man of peace, Kapitsa pleaded that the social sciences be developed intensively in order to create a social system of states that would make war impossible.
Quotations:
"To talk of atomic energy in terms of atomic bombs is like talking of electricity in terms of the electric chair."
"The crocodile cannot turn its head. Like all science, it must always go forward with all-devouring jaws."
"Errors are many, truth is unique."
Institute of Physics , United Kingdom
1934
Institute of Metals , United Kingdom
1943
Tata Institute of Fundamental Research , India
1977
National Academy of Sciences , United States
1946
Corresponding member - 1929
USSR Academy of Sciences
1939
Honorary Member
Moscow Society of Naturalists
1935
Franklin Institute
1944
Trinity College Cambridge
1925
New York Academy of Sciences
1946
Indian Academy of Sciences
1947
Royal Irish Academy
1948
National Institute of Sciences of India
1957
German Academy of Naturalists "Leopoldina"
1958
International Academy of the History of Science
1971
Foreign Member
Royal Danish Academy of Sciences and Letters
1946
Indian National Sciences Academy
1956
Polish Academy of Sciences
1962
Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences
1966
American Academy of Arts and Sciences
1968
Royal Netherlands Academy of Sciences
1969
Serbian Academy of Sciences and Arts
1971
Finnish Academy of Arts and Sciences
1974
In 1916, at age 22, Kapitsa married Nadeshda Chernosvitova. The couple had a son and a daughter. The devastating 1918-1919 Spanish flu epidemic claimed the lives of his entire new family - Nadeshda and both children.
In 1927, in Cambridge, Kapitsa married the artist Anna Krylova, a fellow Russian, whom he affectionately called Rat. She was the daughter of the eminent mathematician Aleksey Krylov. Their two sons, born in Cambridge, enjoyed highly successful careers in science. Sergei, the eldest, became a physicist and hosted the long-running Russian TV show Obvious but Incredible. Andrei became a geographer and discovered Antarctica's amazing subglacial Lake Vostok.
