Piotr Leonidovich Kapitza (1894

Remarkable Physicists

From Galileo to Yukawa

The 250 years from the second half of the seventeenth century saw thebirth of modern physics and its growth into one of the most successful ofthe sciences. The reader will find here the lives of fifty of the mostremarkable physicists from that era described in brief biographies. All thecharacters profiled have made important contributions to physics, throughtheir ideas, through their teaching, or in other ways. The emphasis is ontheir varied life-stories, not on the details of their achievements, but,when read in sequence, the biographies, which are organizedchronologically, convey in human terms something of the way in whichphysics was created. Scientific and mathematical detail is kept to aminimum, so the reader who is interested in physics, but perhaps lacksthe background to follow technical accounts, will find this collection aninviting and easy path through the subject’s modern development.

Satyendranath Bose (1894–1974)

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neverreturnedagain.’Bosealsokeptupaninterestinexperimentalphysics,especiallythermoluminescenceandcrystalstructure.However,hiscreativeperiod for research was essentially over.After the end of the Second World War, which had come close toDhaka, the tension between the Hindu and Muslim communities whichled to the separation of East Bengal from the rest of India was disrupting thework of the university to such an extent that many of the faculty, includingBose, decided that it was time to leave. In 1945 he moved back to Calcutta,as successor to Vankata Raman as professor of physics. He wrote someresearch papers on his ideas for a uniﬁed ﬁeld theory and had some cor-respondence with Einstein about it. In 1954 he was given a seat in theRajya Sabha, the upper chamber of the national parliament, but did not playa very active role in Delhi. Two years later, after retiring from CalcuttaUniversity, he became Vice-Chancellor of the new central university ofVisva-Bharati, which was closely associated with the ideas of the poetRabindranath Tagore. Earlier Tagore had invited Bose to Santiniketan anddedicated to him his

Visva-parichaya

, a book giving an elementary accountof the cosmic and microcosmic world in Bengali, in recognition of Bose’sefforts to popularize science through the mother tongue. However, Bosegave up the Visva-Bharati post after two years, saying that he wanted to gobacktoresearch.In1959hewasappointedtooneoftheprestigiousnationalprofessorships, which left him free to work as he pleased, and he held thisfortherestofhislife,dyingonFebruary4,1974,shortlyafterthecelebrationof his eightieth birthday.AfterhereturnedtoIndiain1926itwastwenty-fiveyearsbeforeBosewent abroad again, but then he travelled extensively and was often seen atscientific conferences. A visit to Japan confirmed his belief that, even inscience, university education in India should be in the mother tongue ofthe students, not in English. The great inspiration of Bose’s life was thework and personality of Albert Einstein. To him Einstein’s personality was‘beyond comparison’, and he was forever grateful to Einstein for the timelyencouragement he had received from him. He hoped to see Einstein againbefore he died but, because of his reputation as a political radical, Bose wasrefused an American visa.ItwasgiventoBosetomakejustoneimportantdiscoveryandtowriteafour-pagepaperaboutit.TheBose–Einsteinstatisticscontinuetohavefar-reachingconsequencesinmodernphysics.EinsteinandBoseindependentlypredicted that, at extremely low temperatures in a dilute, non-interactinggas, atoms would condense to the point where they fall into the same

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From de Broglie to Fermiquantum state, essentially behaving like a single atom. The Bose–Einsteincondensate,predictedbytheory,hasrecentlybeenproducedexperimentally,and its properties are being investigated. Among the elementary particles,the boson commemorates the name of Bose, a name that has an honouredplace in the annals of physics.

Piotr Leonidovich Kapitza (1894–1984)

Piotr Leonidovich Kapitza, later known as Peter Kapitza to the world ofscience, was born in Kronstadt, the island fortress on the river Neva nearSt Petersburg, on July 8, 1894. His father, Colonel (later General) LeonidPetrovich Kapitza, was a military engineer involved in modernizing its for-tiﬁcations. The Kapitzas had been landed gentry with Polish antecedentsand the family was well represented in the professions. His mother, OlgaIeronimovna, to whom he was very close until her death in 1937, was aspecialist in children’s literature and folklore and an important ﬁgure inthe literary world of St Petersburg. Her father, General Ieronim IvanovichStebnitski, was a geographer of international repute, a corresponding mem-ber of the St Petersburg Academy and an ardent world traveller. Unusuallyfor his time, he arranged for his daughters to have higher education, Olga inthe humanities and Alexandra in mathematics and science.

Piotr Leonidovich Kapitza (1894–1984)

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Aunt Alexandra played an important part in the upbringing of hernephew Piotr Leonidovich and it was she who discovered that, although hewas somewhat backward in other respects, he had an unusually quick graspof arithmetic. He never overcame a certain indirectness and sloppiness ofspeech and never learned to spell correctly in any language. He was admit-ted to the classical gymnasium in 1905 but was transferred after a year tothe more scientifically oriented Realschule, which was much more appro-priate to his developing talents. Six years later he graduated with honoursand entered the electrochemical faculty of the St Petersburg polytechnic –withoutLatinandGreekhecouldnotenterthemoreprestigiousuniversity.Kapitza’s studies were interrupted by the First World War. After serv-ing for two years as an ambulance driver on the Polish front, he returnedto the polytechnic and graduated in 1918. After the chaos of war and theupheaval of the revolution, the economy of the country was in a disastrousstate.Nevertheless,anewphysico-technicalinstitutewasestablishedunderthe leadership of Abraham Joffé, the grand old man of Russian physics, whorecruited Kapitza to join his group of enthusiastic young scientists. Therewere great shortages of food and fuel and practically no scientific equip-ment, so experimental research could be carried out only on a ‘do it your-self’ basis. In spite of these difficulties, however, a surprising amount wasachieved.Following a romantic trip to Harbin in China, soon after he had beendemobilized, Kapitza married Nadezhda Kyrillovna, daughter of GeneralChernosvitov, and their son, Ieronim, was born in 1917. A second childwas expected towards the end of 1919, but disaster struck the family.Epidemics were rife in the dreadful conditions following revolution andcivil war. Ieronim died from scarlet fever. Nadezhda was devastated by theloss of her first child; soon afterwards she gave birth to a daughter, onlyfor both mother and child to succumb to the pandemic Spanish flu. ThenKapitza’s father also died of this, and Kapitza himself caught it but sur-vived. Naturally he was overwhelmed by these tragic events and unable tocontinue working.Then something happened that not only distracted him from his griefbut changed the course of his life. This was the setting up, on Joffé’s ini-tiative, of a commission of the Soviet Academy of Sciences for renewingscientificrelationswithothercountries.BesidesJofféhimself,animportantmember of the commission was the naval engineer and applied mathemati-cian Admiral A.N. Krylov, later to become Kapitza’s second father-in-law.Both Joffé and Krylov formed a high opinion of Kapitza’s scientific gifts and