Aristocrat of high science

He was an ARISTOCRAT OF THE SPIRIT, personifying the nobility of true fundamental science. It seemed that the very place of birth of Sergei Kapitsa, Cambridge, February 14, 1928, in the family of the future Nobel laureate, his father, Pyotr Leonidovich Kapitsa, determined a brilliant path. Yes, yes, that’s how it happened, and who said that nature rests on the children of geniuses.

In any case, throughout his long life he worked tirelessly, making high science understandable to millions of people. It is known that a professional is someone who can talk about complex things simply, and here he had no equal in scientific asceticism.

How many generations of Soviet and then Russian television viewers had their hearts sank when Pushkin’s lines sounded: “Oh, how many wonderful discoveries the spirit of enlightenment is preparing for us, and experience is the son of difficult mistakes, and genius is a friend of paradoxes” - the screensaver of the most popular program “Obvious - Incredible” .

And the magnificent magazine “In the World of Science”, the editor-in-chief of which was Sergei Petrovich Kapitsa all these years, sacredly preserving style and respectability.

I was lucky enough to meet him twice in my life, and both times I was amazed by the power of his mind, encyclopedic knowledge and gentle, quiet intelligence. In the early 80s, Novosibirsk Academgorodok, the legendary House of Scientists, I was a young graduate student obsessed with molecular genetics, and made my way to meet him. Shukshinsky's laurels Bronka Pupkov, multiplied by youthful maximalism, and what to hide, stupidity, tried to drive the Moscow celebrity into a corner and effectively cut him off. I remember that I then copiously quoted by heart excerpts from the verbatim report of the VASKhNIL session: “On the Situation in Biological Science” of 1948, the same one that declared genetics a pseudoscience. And the best scientists not only in our country, but also in the world, began to be contemptuously called Morganists and Mendelists, and the Soviet Union then forever lost its primacy in genetics and missed the green revolution of Norman Borlaug, also, by the way, a Nobel laureate.

Meanwhile, those were Andropov times, and I kept attacking and attacking Sergei Petrovich with questions: “Why did some scientists renounce their beliefs and bow to the pseudo-academician, charlatan Trofim Lysenko?” He politely corrected me a couple of times in the quotation, then gave such a heartfelt and painful analysis of the actions of all these unfortunate people, and in their own way dear to him, that I froze and drowned in the absurdity of my pathos and shame.

Fate brought us together for the second time in 2002. Sergei Petrovich invited me to his program “Obvious - Incredible”, as Chairman of the Committee on Agricultural Policy of the Federation Council, to talk about organic agriculture and its prospects in Russia.

Having visited the State Duma and worked in the Government of the Russian Federation, I gained weight and straightened out in articles. In the dressing room, before recording the program, he again confused me. Twenty years later, he remembered both me and our discussion in Akademgorodok, saying approvingly: “But I realized then that you would be good.”

He asked surprisingly precise questions on the topic of the program, once again tactfully dispelling my conviction that I knew everything about organics. Then they drank tea, they wiped me off with makeup wipes, and he, remembering that long-standing argument we had 20 years ago, said with quiet sadness: “History, you know, has a habit of repeating itself. Then, in 1948, it was like a tragedy, now it’s like a farce.” “Yes, yes, young man, many of your political friends will stigmatize the dashing nineties and limit the freedoms that have just been granted.”

It was June 2002 and the deadening breath of the 2000s for the country was obvious to a select few.

Blessed memory to you, SERGEY PETROVICH KAPITS!