On August 14, 2012, Sergei Kapitsa, an outstanding Russian scientist, who, over 80 years of his life, created a huge number of scientific works, passed away. Six months before his death, he was awarded the RAS gold medal for outstanding achievements in the field of promoting scientific knowledge.
Sergei Petrovich Kapitsa was born on February 14, 1928 in the family of the Nobel Prize laureate in physics Pyotr Kapitsa and the daughter of the famous Russian shipbuilder Anna Krylova. The famous Russian physiologist Ivan Pavlov became the scientist's godfather. The place of his birth was Cambridge (Great Britain), where he lived for only seven years, after which the family moved to Moscow.
After graduating from the Moscow Aviation Institute in 1949, Kapitsa began studying supersonic aerodynamics, magnetism, and elementary particle physics. During this period, he published his first scientific works, which immediately attracted attention to the young scientist. In 1956, Sergei Petrovich became a teacher at the Moscow Institute of Physics and Technology, and five years later he received his doctorate in physics and mathematics. In 1965, Kapitsa became a professor and head of the department of general physics at the Moscow Institute of Physics and Technology. Until 1998, he read general physics to students of this institute, demanding that students work independently outside the walls of the educational institution.
In parallel with his teaching activities, Sergei Petrovich was actively engaged in science, on his account there are 4 large monographs, a large number of articles, 14 inventions and one discovery. It was he who created a mathematically verified model of the hyperbolic growth of the population of our planet, which includes the period from 1 year of our era to the present day. In addition, Sergei Kapitsa is called one of the creators of cliodynamics.
In the early seventies, Kapitsa's book "Life of Science" was published, and after a while he began to broadcast "The Obvious - the Incredible", which can still be seen on Russian television. From 1983 to the end of his days, Sergei Petrovich was the editor-in-chief of the popular science journal "In the world of science" (with the exception of the period from 1993 to 2002).
For his scientific and educational activities, Kapitsa was awarded numerous awards and prizes (the RAS Prize for the Popularization of Science in 2002, the Kalinga Prize from UNESCO in 1979, etc.). And in 2008, Sergei Petrovich was awarded TEFI for his personal contribution to Russian television, because for more than 35 years he was the regular host of the Obvious-Incredible program. Kapitsa died on August 14, 2012 in Moscow and was buried next to his father at the Novodevichy cemetery in the capital.
