Pyotr kapitsa biography definition

Retrieved 11 April The Guardian. Retrieved 16 March Nobel Prize. Retrieved 12 November Russian Geographical Society. Retrieved 4 August Scientific American. Bibcode : SciAm. Retrieved 30 April External links [ edit ]. Wikimedia Commons has media related to Pyotr Kapitsa. Laureates of the Nobel Prize in Physics. Curie Rayleigh Lenard J.

Bohr Millikan M. Wilson O. Siegbahn K. Peter D. Mitchell United Kingdom. Smith United States. Herbert A. Simon United States. Nobel Prize recipients Authority control databases. However, to their surprise, Penzias and Wilson found a comparatively high intensity. They suspected at first that this radiation must originate either in the instrument or in the atmosphere.

However, by painstaking testing, they showed that it came from outer space and that its intensity was the same in all directions. Hence, their measurements allowed the surprising conclusion that the universe is filled uniformly with microwave radiation. These two researchers made no suggestions about the origin of this mysterious radiation. When their discovery became known, however, it was found that speculations had already been made about the existence of a weak, microwave background radiation.

The starting-point for these speculations had been a number of attempts, made during the s, to explain the synthesis of chemical elements. A theory developed by the American physicist Gamow and his associates suggested that this synthesis took place at the beginning of the existence of the universe. It is known from studies of the spectra of stars and galaxies that the universe is at present expanding uniformly.

This means that at a certain point, 15 billion years ago, the universe was very compact; it is thus tempting to assume that the universe was created by a cosmic explosion, or 'big bang', although other explanations are possible. This 'big bang' theory implies the occurrence of very high temperatures, of about 10 billion degrees.

Only at those temperatures can various nuclear reactions take place such that chemical elements could be built up from the elementary particles assumed to be present from the very beginning. It also implies the release of a large amount of radiation, whose spectrum extends from the X-ray region, through visible light, to radio waves. After this hypothetical explosion, the temperature would decrease rapidly the whole 'creation' is assumed to have been completed in a few minutes.

The question then remains of what would have happened to the debris of the explosion: matter, consisting of hydrogen, helium and various other light elements, would have expanded as a hot cloud of gas which would gradually have cooled down to form condensations, which developed into galaxies and stars. But what about the radiation? Since the universe is virtually transparent to radiation of these wavelengths, nothing would really have happened to it: the radiation would expand in universe at the same rate as the universe is expanding.

The question is whether it still exists and, if so, whether it can be detected. The difficulty here is that because of the expansion of the universe, the wavelength of the radiation has decreased, in the same way that light from distant galaxies is 'red-shifted' Instead of the 'hard' pyotr kapitsa biography definition that would have been emitted during the 'big bang', the radiation that might be detected now would correspond to that emitted by a body with a temperature of 3 degrees above absolute zero.

No visible light is emitted at such a low temperature, and the radiation emitted falls: entirely within the microwave region, with a maximum intensity of about 0. Learn more about citation styles Citation styles Encyclopedia. More From encyclopedia. About this article Pyotr Kapitsa All Sources. Updated Aug 08 About encyclopedia. Pynson, Richard.

Pyne, Louisa Fanny. Pyne's Ground-plum. Pynchon, Thomas, Jr. Pynchon, Thomas Ruggles, Jr. Pynchon, Thomas —. Pynchon, John. Pyotr Nicolayevich Lebedev. Pyper, Andrew Pyramid Breweries Inc. Pyramid Church of Truth and Light. Pyramid Companies. Pyramid Complexes. Pyramid Guide Newsletter. He was awarded honorary degrees from such Universities as ParisColumbia and Delhi, among others.

He won the Nobel Prize for Physics in He also received many medals and memberships of academic societies. He was under house imprisonment for many years when he declined to conduct research on the military application of atomic energy, losing favor with Josef Stalin. Later, after he had been re-appointed head of the Institute for Physical Problems, he courageously used his own prestige to protest against the way in which the Soviet system tied science with its own ideology.

He refused to sign a letter denouncing the dissident scientist and human rights activist, Andrei Sakharov and was an active campaigner for peace and disarmament. When he died in I, he was the only member of the presidium of the Soviet Academy of Sciences who was not a member of the Communist Party. To have achieved such eminence in the Soviet Union without party membership was of itself a remarkable accomplishment.

Instead of remaining neutral, this scientist occupied the moral high ground and refused to be intimidated by a totalitarian government and dared to risk personal censure by speaking up on behalf of friends and colleagues. Kapitsa was born in the city of Kronstadt, Russia and was a son of military engineer Leonid Petrovich Kapitsa, and Olga Stebnitskaya, educator and folklore researcher.

He graduated from the Petrograd Polytechnical Institute inafter publishing his first works in "Russian Society of Phisics and Chemistry Journal.

Pyotr kapitsa biography definition

At the suggestion of A. Ioffe inhe travelled to the England as committee member for the purpose of restoration of scientific contacts, acquiring equipment and literature. Inhe was appointed the Messel Research Professor of the Royal Society, and was the first director of the Mond Laboratory from to During this period, he originated techniques for creating ultra-strong magnetic fields by injecting high currents into specially constructed air-core electromagnets for brief periods of time.

Inhe developed a new and original apparatus for producing significant quantities of liquid helium, based on the adiabatic principle.