Pyotr Kapitsa was a Russian physicist who directed the Mond Laboratory in England and the Physical Problems Institute in the Soviet Union during the 1930s and 1940s. He performed important research on high-density magnetic fields and high-energy plasma, but he is best known for his work on low-temperature physics, for which he shared the 1978 Nobel Prize in physics with Arno Penzias and Robert W. Wilson . Though many scientists believed that Kapitsa led the Soviet effort to develop an atomic bomb during World War II, Kapitsa, a longtime opponent of the Communist government, always denied the claim, and he is now generally not regarded as one of the bomb's designers.

Pyotr Leonidovich Kapitsa was born on July 8, 1894, in Kronstadt, an island near St. Petersburg, Russia. His father, Leonid Petrovich Kapitsa, was a lieutenant general in the engineers corps. His mother, Olga Ieronimovna Stebnitskaya, was an educator and a well-known...