21 Facts About Pyotr Kapitsa

1.

Pyotr Kapitsa's studies were interrupted by the First World War, in which he served as an ambulance driver for two years on the Polish front.

2.

Pyotr Kapitsa graduated from the Petrograd Polytechnical Institute in 1918.

3.

Pyotr Kapitsa subsequently studied in Britain, working for over ten years with Ernest Rutherford in the Cavendish Laboratory at the University of Cambridge, and founding the influential Kapitza club.

4.

Pyotr Kapitsa was the first director of the Mond Laboratory in Cambridge.

5.

In 1934 Pyotr Kapitsa returned to Russia to visit his parents but the Soviet Union prevented him from travelling back to Great Britain.

6.

Pyotr Kapitsa formed the Institute for Physical Problems, in part using equipment which the Soviet government bought from the Mond Laboratory in Cambridge.

7.

In Russia, Pyotr Kapitsa began a series of experiments to study liquid helium, leading to the discovery in 1937 of its superfluidity.

8.

Pyotr Kapitsa reported the properties of this new state of matter in a series of papers, for which he was later awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics "for basic inventions and discoveries in the area of low-temperature physics".

9.

In November 1945, Pyotr 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.

10.

Stalin backed Pyotr Kapitsa, telling Beria he had to cooperate with the scientists.

11.

In 1966, Pyotr Kapitsa was allowed to visit Cambridge to receive the Rutherford Medal and Prize.

12.

Pyotr Kapitsa asked to borrow one, but a college servant asked him when he last dined at high table, "Thirty-two years" replied Kapitza.

13.

In 1978, Pyotr Kapitsa won the Nobel Prize in Physics "for his basic inventions and discoveries in the area of low-temperature physics" and was cited for his long term role as a leader in the development of this area.

14.

Pyotr Kapitsa shared the prize with Arno Allan Penzias and Robert Woodrow Wilson, who won for discovering the cosmic microwave background.

15.

Pyotr Kapitsa resistance is the thermal resistance at the interface between liquid helium and a solid.

16.

Pyotr Kapitsa was married in 1927 to Anna Alekseyevna Krylova, daughter of applied mathematician Aleksey Krylov.

17.

Pyotr Kapitsa was the host of the popular and long-running Russian scientific TV show Evident, but Incredible.

18.

Pyotr Kapitsa 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.

19.

Pyotr Kapitsa had the ear of people high up in the Soviet government, due to the usefulness to industry of his discoveries, regularly writing letters on matters of science policy.

20.

Pyotr Kapitsa died on 8 April 1984 in Moscow at the age 89.

21.

Pyotr Kapitsa was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society in 1929.