Word: kapitza
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Some 14 years ago big-eyed, bushy-haired Peter Kapitza emerged from Leningrad's Polytechnical Institute, went to England's Cambridge, puttered with radioactivity. It occurred to him that he might learn much about the atom if he could wrench at it with tremendous magnetic forces. His first apparatus was a battery of accumulators short-circuiting through a wire coil, producing a momentary magnetic field of high power. Next he designed a huge dynamo to provide the short-circuiting power. With this the coils blew up. Kapitza stopped that by chilling the coils with liquid helium...
British science was impressed. Kapitza was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society, first alien to be thus honored in two centuries. To house his generator, helium liquefier and other equipment, an ornate new laboratory was built in the courtyard of Cavendish Laboratory, with steel and scarlet furniture in the director's office, separate rooms for the heavy apparatus, vibration-damping walls, an Eric Gill plaque of Lord Rutherford, boss of Cavendish Laboratory, in the entrance hall. Cost: $75,000. Happy Dr. Kapitza went in as director, started investigating the magnetic resistance of substances at low temperatures. At three...