4. Igor Kurchatov

Igor Vasilyevich Kurchatov was a Soviet/Russian physicist. He was the leader of the Soviet atomic bomb project. Kurchatov was born in Simsky Zavod, Ufa Governorate (now the town of Sim, Chelyabinsk Oblast). After completing Simferopol gymnasium №1, he studied physics at Crimea State University and ship building at the Polytechnical Institute in Petrograd. In 1924-1925, Kurchatov was a research assistant at the faculty of Physics of the Polytechnic Institute in Baku, the present-day Azerbaijan State Oil Academy. In 1925 he moved to the Physico-Technical Institute, where he worked (under Abram Fedorovich Ioffe) on various problems connected with radioactivity. In 1932, he received funding for his own nuclear science research team, which built the Soviet Union's first cyclotron (September 21, 1939).

Igor Kurchatov and his apprentice Georgy Flyorov discovered the basic ideas of the uranium chain reaction and the nuclear reactor concept in the 1930s. When war broke out between Germany and the USSR in 1941, Kurchatov switched his research first to protecting shipping from magnetic mines, and later to tank armour. In 1943 the NKVD obtained a copy of a secret British report by the MAUD Committee concerning the feasibility of atomic weapons.Stalin ordered Kurchatov to produce a bomb by 1948. The project took over the town of Sarov in the Gorki Oblast (now Nizhny Novgorod Oblast) on the Volga, and renamed it Arzamas-16.

Kurchatov subsequently worked on the Soviet hydrogen bomb program (1953), but later worked for the peaceful use of nuclear technology, and advocated against nuclear bomb tests.

Among the projects held under Kurchatov were the first cyclotron in Moscow (1949), the first Atomic Reactor in Europe (1946), the first Nuclear power plant in the world (1954), the first Nuclear reactor for Submarines in the world (1959), Nuclear Icebreakers (Lenin, both the world's first nuclear powered surface ship and the first nuclear powered civilian vessel, 1959). Kurchatov died in Moscow in 1960 and his ashes were buried in the Kremlin Wall Necropolis on Red Square.

Answer the questions:

1. What field did Igor Kurchatov work in?

2. What was his contribution to the science?

3. Where did Kurchatov study?

4. Where did he switch his research in 1941?

5. What were the projects held under Kurchatov?

6. When did Kurchatov die?

5. Ivan Puliy

Ivan was born in the town of Hrymailovo (now in TernopiF region) on February 2d, 1845. His father, Pavlo Puliy, a well-educated man, the mayor of Hrymailovo, sent the son to study at a hymnasia in Ternopil. Having gradu­ated from it Ivan went to Vienna where he was matriculated at the Depart­ment of Theology of the University of Vienna in 1864. He also enrolled for the courses of mathematics, physics and astronomy. Later against the will of his father he began to study at the Department of Philosophy.

Upon graduation Ivan worked as an assistant teacher of experimental physics at Vienna University and later taught physics at a military school in Chroatia. Feeling he had to upgrade his knowledge Ivan traveled to Strasbourg where he studied electrical engineering, a new field then. There he met Wilhelm Roentgen, a German physicist.

In 1878 Ivan Puliy received a silver medal at the International Exhibition in Paris for a device used for determining the mechanical equivalent of heat and in 1881 – another silver medal at such an exhibition for what became known as “Puliy’s lamp”, a device which was, in fact, the first X-ray tube in the world. Ivan Puliy worked on what would be later called X-rays in the early 1880s in Vienna simaltenously with the professor Roentgen who started his research with cathode tube thanks to Puliy’s ideas. Roentgen won a Nobel Prize for X-ray discovery and Ivan Puliy remained known only to a narrow circle of scientists.

Ivan Puliy died in Prague in 1918. Memorial plaques were installed in Prague and Vienna as well as several streets in these cities, and in Kyiv and Lviv were named after Puliy. A monument was erected in his native town. In 1998 the National Academy of Sciences of Ukraine established an Ivan Puliy Prize to be awarded for considerable achievements in the field of experimental physics. His works are published in four volumes and his sci­entific experience is widely used.