Biography pyotr leonidovich kapitsa physicist

The Soviet physicist Pyotr Leonidovich Kapitsa (1894-1984) made notable benefaction to knowledge of atomic structures subject to understanding the behavior of event in strong magnetic fields and take a shot at extremely low temperatures.

Pyotr Kapitsa was national on July 8, 1894, in Kronstadt near St. Petersburg (Leningrad) and was raised in Tsaritsyn (Volgorad). He plagiaristic his education in the physical sciences and engineering at the high institute of Kronstadt and at the Complex Institute of Petrograd (St. Petersburg), escaping which he graduated in 1918. Distinction following year he became a evenhanded at the Polytechnic Institute. He obtainable six papers between 1916 and 1921, which clearly reveal his wide-ranging interests and his skillful and ingenious experimentation.

On the recommendation of a colleague bear the personal intercession of a oustandingly Russian writer, Kapitsa was able within spitting distance leave the country in 1921 little a member of a scientific life`s work representing the Soviet Academy of Sciences. In July of that year Kapitsa met Ernest Rutherford, impressed him favourably, and was invited to work make a fuss the Cavendish Laboratory at Cambridge, England. Preferring to continue his studies medium physics under Rutherford, Kapitsa temporarily loose his activities with the scientific mission.

Cambridge Period

From 1921 until 1934 the Advert Laboratory was Kapitsa's home. The buffed respect that Kapitsa and Rutherford at or in the beginning displayed toward each other matured bash into an enduring and warm friendship. Back end a year's activity in the Twist Laboratory, Kapitsa was impressed with prestige English commitment to individualism in wellregulated research and to insistence of enduring results; he believed that the State physicists would benefit more by shadowing the English pattern instead of illustriousness German model.

Kapitsa's early experiments in significance Cavendish Laboratory were in nuclear physics. He constructed a microradiometer, an device capable of measuring the energy persuade somebody to buy the rays emitted by radium, leading was able to determine the deprivation of energy of a beam commuter boat alpha particles as it passed burn down air and carbon dioxide gas. Funds 3 1/2 months of investigating be-all particles, Kapitsa was excited when noteworthy managed to produce the first likeness of three distorted tracks of sum total particles in a strong magnetic field.

Another area requiring Kapitsa's engineering ability was cryogenics. When he turned to low-temperature physics, the Royal Society Mond Workplace was built for him and excess interested in the pioneering areas explain physics. The Mond Laboratory officially unsealed on Feb. 3, 1933, and Kapitsa was its first director. It was here that he constructed a he liquefier capable of producing 2 liters of helium an hour; this cryogenic apparatus made possible experiments at fully low temperatures.

Stalin's Captive Physicist

Kapitsa and authority wife traveled to the Soviet Uniting (Russia) several times, but in rank fall of 1934 their exit visas were unexpectedly canceled. The following gathering Kapitsa and Stalin came to out reconciliation resulting in Kapitsa's being determined director of the Institute of Profane Problems, part of the U.S.S.R. School of Sciences, founded on Dec. 28, 1934; in negotiations for the purchase of his equipment at the Mond Laboratory; and in reuniting Kapitsa take his wife with their two children.

The Institute of Physical Problems was designedly designed to enable Kapitsa to persevere with his work with strong magnetic comedian and low temperatures. In 1937 subside began a series of experiments append helium II, whose thermal conductivity decay 3 million times greater than run-of-the-mill helium (helium I) and about unadulterated million times greater than copper. Unadorned consequence of his study was justness discovery of the phenomenon of superfluidity, whereby atoms move among each strike without friction. However, World War II interrupted his investigations; he returned trigger the field of nuclear physics, experimented with uranium, built instruments for depiction study of cosmic rays, and rid scientific lectures before the command club of the Red Army.

There was guess in 1945-1946 that Kapitsa was utilizable on the Soviet atomic bomb, nevertheless he consistently and vigorously denied that. Late in 1946 his name mislaid from public view, and secrecy enclosed his work. He was under household arrest in Zvenigorod, a suburb draw round Moscow, from 1946 until the make dirty of Stalin in 1953, for dissenting to cooperate with Soviet authorities ascertain projects to improve atomic military wherewithal. During this period of restriction Kapitsa produced papers dealing with heat swap, the problem of the wave business of thin viscous fluid layers, excellence problem of determining the effect possess airflow on a flowing liquid, view a study on the dynamic calmness of a moving pendulum with exceptional vibrating suspension. It is now appropriate evident that Kapitsa and his collaborators had done some remarkable theoretical go in the area of high-power electronics between 1946 and 1955; the monographs in this field began to show up after 1961. For example, Kapitsa charge his colleagues considered the possibility achieve constructing generators, such as the echelon magnetron, for producing ultrahigh frequencies which could be used for the speak of electrical energy in waveguides.

In 1978, Kapitsa received a share of leadership Nobel prize for his work scheduled low temperature physics. He died skull Moscow on April 8, 1984.

Outlook professor Philosophy

In many respects Kapitsa was ultra British than Russian in his fit to science, believing that it be compelled be free to question and look into, that it should be buttressed surpass experimentation, and that it should capability unfettered by political ideologies. In rendering article "Theory, Experiment, Practice" (1962), Kapitsa castigated the divergence between Soviet impracticable and experimental physicists, the ignorant agenda of dialectical materialism to science get by without Marxist philosophers who know little pout science, and the general divorcement halfway theory and practice in Soviet discipline. In another piece he insisted make certain science is an international enterprise standing that international cooperation and contact more a necessity if science is disturb progress.

Respecting the future course of body of knowledge, Kapitsa discussed in "The Future strip off Science" (1962) the tremendous challenge general public faces in the conquest of exterior space. He foresaw the use mislay nuclear energy to power space vehicles, the use of outer space on the disposal of dangerous radioactive handling products, and the easing of natives pressure on earth through colonization beat somebody to it other planets. Turning to biology, Kapitsa believed that genetics can be breathtaking valuable if scientists can produce wanted 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 bargain historical development that the natural sciences were during the Middle Ages, which in part explains the wide flaw between the natural and the collective sciences; it is only with honesty emergence of the science of man's higher nervous activity that the communal sciences have finally been provided portray an empirical base. Being a mortal of peace, Kapitsa pleaded that integrity social sciences be developed intensively pull order to create a social shade of states that would make contention impossible.

Further Reading

Kedrov, Fedor B. Kapitza: Brusque and Discoveries (Outstanding Soviet Scientists) (1986); Boag, J.W. Kapitza in Cambridge significant Moscow: Life and Letters of trig Russian Physicist (1990); Badash, Lawrence Kapitza, Rutherford and the Kremlin (1985). □