March 14, 1912
A 46-year-old man died in Moscow. Petr Lebedev — an experimental physicist who confirmed light pressure. "The man who weighed light."
Every device operates in only one way, not a million ways. The experimenter's task is to find the only correct one out of a million and one ways.
Born in 1866 in Moscow, into a merchant family. His father worked in a tea trading house and had his own business.
I became interested in electrical engineering when I was studying at a private school.
I will be a servant of science and a priest of electrical engineering, and I will work for the benefit of society, not forgetting myself. Long live electricity, and may it glorify us forever and ever!
(entry from the diary of Lebedev as a teenager)
At 18, he entered the Imperial Moscow Technical School; access to university was closed to him because he had not graduated from high school.
I encountered the most absurd, monstrous system: already knowing what practice requires, I had to perform, for example, in drawing such nonsense that could never exist in practice for even three days.
However, studying at a technical school helped him: later he was able to design his own setups for his experiments.
Every physicist must be able to saw and plane no less than to differentiate and integrate
At 21, he dropped out of school and, with his father’s money, went to Strasbourg University. Interned with a famous physicist. August Kundt. At 25 he defended his scientific work and became a Doctor of Natural Philosophy.
Returning to Moscow, he found a job as an assistant in the physics lab at Moscow University. He lectured and continued his experiments, including producing a record-breaking 6-millimeter electromagnetic wave.
I have a terrible dislike for experimentally difficult work: I always have this unpleasant feeling that I was not clever enough to come up with a simpler study of the question, although in this case I cannot even guess how it could have been made even simpler.
In 1899, 33-year-old Lebedev experimentally proved the theory James Maxwell on the pressure of light on solids (and later on gases). His discoveries contributed to the development of physics (the theory of relativity, quantum theory), astrophysics, electrical engineering, and energy.
I fought with Maxwell all my life, not recognizing his light pressure, and now your Lebedev forced me to surrender to his experiments.
(physicist William Thomson to physiologist Kliment Timiryazev)
A year after his discoveries, he received a PhD in physics, skipping a master's degree. He became a professor, headed the physics department at Moscow University, and lectured throughout Europe.
At the same time, he founded a scientific physics school, the first in Russia. By 1905, 28 students, future talented physicists, were working in his laboratory.
In 1911, he left Moscow University along with many progressive teachers in protest against the reactionary policies of the Minister of Public Education. Leo Kasso. He was invited to work at the Nobel Institute in Stockholm. Lebedev, like many of his colleagues, transferred to the Shanyavsky People's University. There, he established a new physics laboratory, but was unable to continue his research due to a heart condition from his youth.
For many years, he also studied the effects of electromagnetic waves on resonators, intermolecular bonds, acoustics, and hydroacoustics. In the last years of his life, his attention was drawn to the problem of ultrasound.
His experimental devices were so small that they could be carried in a pocket.
He was nominated for the Nobel Prize twice (the second time posthumously).
In 2014, director Sergei Vinogradov made a 40-minute documentary about Lebedev, “The Man Who Weighed the World.”
