Reading comprehension

Prereading discussion

This is the photo of one of the most famous Russian physicists Pyotr Leonidovich Kapitsa (1894 – 1984) who discovered superfluidity with contribution from John F. Allen and Don Misener in 1937, the founder of the Institute of Physical Problems in Moscow. The Institute was built according to a plan which had been drawn by Kapitsa himself with equipment purchased by the Soviet Government from the Mond Laboratory in Cambridge with the assistance of Ernest Rutherford, once it was clear that Kapitsa would not be permitted to return to England.

He was appointed Director of the Institute, named after him. Kapitsa was also one of the founders of Moscow Institute of Physics and Technology.

After the war, P. Kapitsa began to work in an entirely new field of science and technology - high-power electronics.

Kapitsa won the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1978 for his work in low temperature physics. He shared the prize with Arno Allan Penzias and Robert Woodrow Wilson (who won for unrelated work).

Kapitsa was born in the city of Kronstadt, and graduated from the Petrograd Polytechnical Institute in 1918. He worked in the Cavendish Laboratory in Cambridge with Ernest Rutherford for over 10 years, was made a Fellow of the Royal Society in 1929, and was the first director of the Mond Laboratory from 1930 to 1934. During this period, he originated techniques for creating ultrastrong magnetic fields by injecting high currents into specially constructed air-core electromagnets for brief periods of time. In 1934 he developed a new and original apparatus for producing significant quantities of liquid helium, based on the adiabatic principle.

In 1934 he was on a professional visit to the Soviet Union when his passport was detained and he was not permitted to leave the country.

In August 1946, Kapitsa was removed from his role as head of the institute he created and exiled to his dacha near Moscow, over his refusal to take part in the Soviet hydrogen bomb project. In a letter to Stalin, Kapitsa described the project's leader, Lavrenty Beria, as "like the conductor of an orchestra with the baton in hand but without a score". After Stalin's death he regained his position, and remained a director of the institute until 1984. At his death in 1984 he was the only member of the presidium of the Soviet Academy of Sciences who was not a member of the Communist Party.

Recommended resources: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pyotr_Leonidovich_Kapitsa

1. There were three professional physicists were there in Russia at the turn of the XXth century: Academician Krylov and Kapitsa who was then only twenty-seven.
2. Young Kapitsa was keenly interested in physics.
3. He didn’t enter the University, because had been expelled from the Kronstadt classic school for poor academic progress.
4. He completed the laboratory course in two weeks instead of the usual two years.
5. Ernest Rutherford took personal interest in him and Kapitsa became his favourite pupil.

6. In the war years, Kapitsa devoted all his talent of a scientist and an engineer to the cause of the country's defence.

7. He proved the fact that the electrons are capable of transmitting millions of kilowatts over long distances.

Ask students to make a brief retelling about Pyotr Kapitsa, using active vocabulary

Дата добавления: 2014-12-23