Nobel Prize-winner dies, aged 89

Press, 26 April 1984, Page 25

Nobel Prize-winner dies, aged 89

Moscow NZPA-Reuter The Nobel

Prize-winner, Peter Kapitza, one of the world’s leading physicists, who is believed to have been involved in development of the Soviet atomic bomb, has died at the age of 89, Tass news agency reported.

He did Pioneer work in low-temperature physics, opening the way to today’s super-conductive metals and super-cool components in computers. Dr Kapitza left Russia in 1921, at the height of the civil war, for Britain, where he worked under Ernest Rutherford, the New Zealander who was the first man to split the atom. He became deputy head of Cambridge’s famed Cavendish Laboratory.

In 1929 he was elected to Britain’s most prestigious scientific body, the Royal Society. He returned to the Soviet Union in 1934 as a tourist with a guarantee he

again. He was not. An authoritative Western biographical source said Dr Kapitza’s passive resistance to the Soviet atomic bomb programme brought him a brief jail term. Soviet secrecy on such matters had prevented the full extent of his involvement with or opposition to the nuclear project being known. At the Pugwash conference of scientists against nuclear weapons in Sweden in 1967, Dr Kapitza denied having worked on the bomb project and said he was never imprisoned. The Soviet Union bought up his laboratory and transported it from Britain. For a year Dr Kapitza refused to work, but in the end he agreed.

In 1946 he was dismissed from the post of director of the Institute of Physical Problems, according to one source for his refusal to work on the bomb, which was interpreted as

“premeditated sabotage of national defence.” After Stalin’s death he was rehabilitated. His obituary was signed by the Soviet leader, Mr Konstantin Chernenko. In 1957 it was disclosed Dr Kapitza had worked on the Sputnik project. But when he returned to Britain for a brief visit in 1966, he condemned the waste of money on space programmes.

The work for which Dr Kapitza is best known is his development of the technique of super-cooling to liquefy gases. He invented a machine called the turbodetander which allowed the production of large quantities of liquid helium and oxygen.

He discovered the important phenomenon known as “superflow” in liquid helium and it was his research in the field of low temperature physics which won a Nobel Prize in 1978./1