Nobel Prize in Physics Recipient. Pyotr Kapitsa, a Russian physicist, received international recognition after being awarded the 1978 Nobel Prize in Physics, and according to the Nobel Prize committee, "for his basic inventions and discoveries in the area of low-temperature physics." He received half of the covet award, while two nearly forty-year younger physicists, Arno Allan Penzias and Robert Woodrow Wilson, each received a fourth of the prize. Starting in 1945, he received a total of 34 nominations for the Nobel Prize candidacy. He was born the son of an engineer and a well-educated noble woman. In English his name was Peter or Piotr Kapitza. The family spoke Russian and Romanian. His education was interrupted by World War I, where he served as an ambulance driver on the Polish frontlines. In 1918 he graduated from the Petrograd Polytechnical Institute. During the world-wide flu epidemic of 1918 through 1919, his father, wife and two small children died as a result. He traveled to England to study with Ernest Rutherford, the Director of the Cavendish Laboratory at the University of Cambridge and Nobel Prize in Physics recipient for 1908. Rutherford was instrumental in founding the influential Kapitza Club for physicists. From 1930 to 1934 he was the first director of the Mond Laboratory in Cambridge. In 1920 he originated techniques for creating ultralong magnetic fields, and in 1928 he discovered the linear dependency of resistivity on magnetic field strength in various metals for very strong magnetic fields. When he returned to Russia in 1934 to visit his family, the Soviet Union refused to give him permission to return to England. Learning of the situation, Rutherford obtained permission to send his notes and equipment to him, but in the delay, he began to research low temperature phenomena. In 1934 he discovered a means of developing liquid helium. The same year, he formed the P. L. Kapitza Institute for Physical Problems with the supplies and equipment that Rutherford had sent him. In 1937 he discovered superfluidity, the characteristic property of a fluid with zero viscosity. It was this discovery that led to him receiving the Nobel Prize. At the end of World War II, he was pushed to help make an atomic bomb. With him openly supporting peace and disarmament, tensions soon developed between him and the political chairman and the Soviet dictator, Joseph Stalin, who had supported him in the past. With the government retaliating, by mid-1946 Kapitsa had been dismissed from all of his official positions, except membership in the Academy of Sciences, but was reinstated after Stalin's death in 1953. After Stalin's death , he lobbied with others for the building of the Moscow Institute of Physics and Technology, where he taught for many years. From 1957 until his death, he was a member of the presidium of Soviet Academy of Sciences, and at that time, the only presidium that was not a member of the Communist Party. He returned to Cambridge in 1966 to receive the Rutherford Medal and Prize, and to his surprise his ceremonial robe was still in the coat closet where he had left it thirty-two years earlier. No one had moved it in hope that he would return. Besides the Nobel Prize and the Rutherford Medal, he received a long list of honors including the Faraday Medal of the Institute of Electrical Engineers in 1942, the Franklin Medal of the Franklin Institute in 1944, the International Niels Bohr Medal of Denmark in 1964, and many Russian awards. He was elected in 1929 a Fellow of the Royal Academy, in 1968 the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, in 1958 a member of the German Academy of Sciences Leopoldina, and numerous other learned scientific societies. He received honorary degrees from eleven universities around the world. In 1927 he remarried and had two sons. He hosted a Russian scientific television show.