Soviet Nobel-winner has never toed the line

Press, 23 October 1978, Page 7

Soviet Nobel-winner has never toed the line

By

CRAIG WHITNEY,

of the New York Times News Service Moscow Pyotr Kapitsa, the Soviet scientist who has _ been awarded a Nobel Prize in physics, angered the dictator, Josef Stalin, 39 years ago by his refusal to work on the atomic bomb for the Russians. “Stalin was outraged,” Nikita Khrushchev later remembered in his memoirs. “He said Kapitsa had absolutely nothing to do with the. bomb, and I believe that was the truth." Khrushchev added, however, that Professor Kapitsa knew ail about the bomb because of his contacts with other scientists who did work on it and produced the first Soviet atomic explosion in 1949. “The point is,” Khrushchev insisted, “he refused to touch any military research.” Kapitsa, who is now aged 84 found out about the award of the Nobel Prize — for work he did decades ago — at a sanatorium where he is now staying outside Moscow, according to his son, Dr Sergei Kapitsa. “It could have been made earlier,” the son said, but he added that a Soviet Government official had called his father with

congratulations soon after the announcement of the prize. It was an indication of Kapitsa’s ambiguous status in his homeland that the Soviet official news agency, Tass, took several hours to announce the award, and then without comment.

Kapitsa, who was bom in Kronstadt, a naval base near what is now Leningrad, in 1894, has been decorated by his motherland five times with the Order of Lenin despite his political views.

He received the Nobel Prize — shared with two American physicists — for his work in the field of lowtemperature physics. Educated at the polytechnical institute in Leningrad, Kapitsa left in 1921 to study at Cambridge. In 1929 he became the first foreigner in 200 years to be elected to the Royal Society, and the Mond Laboratory was built especially for him at Cambridge in 1939. But in 1934 he was enticed back to the U.S.S.R. on what he thought would be merely a visit. His passport was seized, and Stalin kept him there permanently. But he established the Institute of Problems of Physics for him that same year. Stalin’s purges after 1936 brought the future Nobel Prize-winner into political

difficulty. Lev Landau, senior research worker of the institute, was arrested in the purges, and Kapitsa interceded to get him released. The prosecutors informed him that Landau had been condemned as a German agent. Kapitsa told Stalin he would resign and leave his institute unless his colleague was released. Zhores A. Medvedev, the dissident Soviet geneticist, later recalled: "Kapitsa had, at this time, a great international reputation, and the Government considered him to be very important for some key research projects, partly related to atomic physics. It was clear that Kapitsa meant business. After a short time Landau was cleared of all charges and released.”

Kapitsa’s refusal to cooperate in the development of the Soviet atomic bomb got him fired from the directorship o.' his institute in 1946, but he was restored to his position in 1954, after Stalin’s death. In 1966 he was among 25 Soviet scientists and other intellectuals who petitioned the Communis* Party leadership before the 23d Congress not to rehabilitate Stalin. And in 1970, Zhores Medvedev recalled from exile in London, Kapitsa was “very, very energetic” in getting him re-

leased from a Soviet mental hospital after Medvedev’s criticisms of Soviet science had been published abroad.

Unlike his fellow atomic physicist, Andrei Sakharov, Kapitsa did not become a dissident. He was allowed to leave the Soviet Union in May, 1965, when he went to Denmark to receive a Niels Bohr Medal. A year later, he returned to England for the first time in 32 years; and he made a trip to the United States in 1969.

Kapitsa’s pioneering work dates back many years. Kapitsa’s Law. formulated with polycrystallic structure grows in proportion to the intensity of the magnetic field around them. In 1941, he was credited with discovering that helium 11. the stable fonn of liquid helium, below minus 271 Celsius has almost no resistance to flow — it becomes “super-fluid.”

His later work in the 1960 s is said to have concentrated on controlled thermo-nuclear fusion — in essence, controlling the atomic reactions of the H-bomb for peaceful purposes. His son said Professor Kapitsa, a full member of the renowned Soviet Academy of Sciences for 39 years, still works a full day even now and often spends Saturdays and Sundays in the laboratory.