Post #3789

He started a chain reaction ⚗ Today marks the 130th anniversary of the birth of Nikolai Nikolaevich Semyonov, an outstanding physicist, chemist, and professor at the Polytechnic Institute, the first Nobel Prize winner in chemistry in the USSR — awarded in 1956 (jointly with Cyril Hinshelwood) "for his research into the mechanism of chemical reactions." 📚 At just 24 years old, Nikolai Nikolaevich became a lecturer at the Petrograd Polytechnic Institute. And as a 30-year-old associate professor, he founded his own school, which colleagues aptly nicknamed the "Semyonov Regiment." 🧪 Nikolai Nikolaevich made fundamental contributions to the establishment of chemical physics: he developed the theory of chain and branched reactions (using the oxidation of phosphorus vapor as an example), the theory of thermal explosions and combustion of gas mixtures, and together with Pyotr Kapitsa, he devised a method for measuring the magnetic moment of the atom. Russian post by @polytech_petra