Sergei Kapitza
| Sergey Kapitsa | |
|---|---|
 |
|
| Born |
14 February 1928 Cambridge, England |
| Died | 14 August 2012 (aged 84) Moscow, Russian Federation |
| Citizenship | British |
| Fields | Physics, demography |
| Institutions | Kapitza Institute for Physical Problems, RAS and Moscow Institute of Physics and Technology |
| Alma mater | Moscow Aviation Institute |
| Known for | TV science magazine host since 1973 |
| Notable awards | UNESCO's Kalinga Prize for the Popularization of Science, 1979 and USSR State Prize, 1980 |
Sergey Petrovich Kapitsa (Russian: Серге́й Петро́вич Капи́ца; 14 February 1928 – 14 August 2012) was a Russian physicist and demographer. He was best known as host of the popular and long-running Russian scientific TV show, Evident, but Incredible. His father was the Nobel laureate Soviet-era physicist Pyotr Kapitsa, and his brother was the geographer and Antarctic explorer Andrey Kapitsa.
Kapitsa was born in Cambridge, England, the son of Anna Alekseevna (Krylova) and Pyotr Kapitsa. His maternal grandfather was Aleksey Nikolaevich Krylov, naval engineer, applied mathematician and memoirist, and the developer of the insubmersibility technique. Kapitsa graduated from the Moscow Aviation Institute in 1949. He was Senior Research Fellow at the Lebedev Physical Institute, Russian Academy of Sciences and Professor at the Moscow Institute of Physics and Technology.
Kapitsa's contributions to physics were in the areas of applied electrodynamics and accelerator physics; he is known, in particular, for his work on the microtron, a device for producing electron beams. In later years, his research focus was on historical demography, where he developed a number of mathematical models of the World System population hyperbolic growth and the global demographic transition.
His activities in science popularization included hosting the Russian Television program, Evident, but Incredible, starting in 1973, for which he was awarded UNESCO's Kalinga Prize for the Popularization of Science in 1979 and the USSR State Prize in 1980, and editing the Russian edition of Scientific American from 1982 onwards. He was also active in issues of science and society through his participation in the Pugwash conferences and the Club of Rome. In the 1980s he, along with Carl Sagan, was outspoken about the possibility that international nuclear war would bring about a nuclear winter, making presentations in the US Senate in 1983 and the United Nations in 1985. He was an advocate of planetary exploration and served on the advisory council of the Planetary Society. In 2012, Kapitsa was awarded the first gold medal of the Russian Academy of Sciences for outstanding achievements in the dissemination of scientific knowledge.
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