So here is the promised translation of ending of Ivanov’s memoirs, where he talks about Kapitsa’s, Sakharov’s and his own view on the existence of the “Supreme Mind”.
“What has the idea of the Supreme Mind to do with my or any other person's age? Peter Leonidovich Kapitsa,
“What has the idea of the Supreme Mind to do with my or any other person's age? Peter Leonidovich Kapitsa,
a Nobel laureate, a man with an amazing biography, once spoke about this to me. In the twenties, he was the most important experimentalist in Russian physics. Academician Ioffe proposed to send him to England, because in Russia there was no sufficiently advanced equipment.
Thus a man disappeared who better than anyone else was able to work with modern experimental devices. Kapitsa lived in England, got married there, I knew well his wonderful wife, the daughter of academician Krylov, Anna Alekseevna Kapitsa. She was an art critic.
She was very important to him and supported in difficult circumstances. Kapitsa usually went to Russia from England for the summer to see his mother. And through the Embassy it was agreed in advance that he would be allowed to return.
But in 1934, they refused to let him go back to England. A dispute between the Soviet and British governments began. Molotov was chairman of the Council of People's Commissars. He simply sent an ultimatum to the British: you want to get back Kapitsa. He works at Rutherford’s
laboratory. So just send Rutherford here. in your laboratory . That was , well, just gangsterism. Rutherford found a way out. He realized that they would not return Kapitsa, so he decided to give him all his wonderful laboratory, all the wonderful technical equipment!
In this way they created the Institute of Physical Problems, which still exists, I have been there many times. Kapitsa became its director and implemented his wonderful, amazing project - how to organise the perfect modern institute. This is perhaps the only scientific
institution in the world built in such an ideal way. The main idea is to have very few major scientists, but all of world class, and a large number of support people who would carry out the technical work. Kapitsa created all this. Because he managed this, he became an
significant figure for Stalin. There is a letter to Stalin in which Kapitsa explains that Beria is destroying our modern science by surrounding it with secrecy. Science cannot be kept under a burqa; it cannot be made a secret.
We were very close, he was friends with my father, and then with me. And he told me that by the age of eighty he had formed an opinion that what he had done as a scientist was a description of a huge system, which is the creation of some rational Mind. He believed that many
scientists came to the same conclusion at the end of their lives. As an example, he mentioned Mikhail Aleksandrovich Leontovich, a member of the editorial board of the Journal of Experimental and Theoretical Physics, where Kapitsa was editor in chief.
At a meeting of the editorial board, he and Leontovich shared the same idea: over the years, it became increasingly clear to them that the main object of science and of individual scientists was achieving an understanding of what was created or planned,
so to speak, by the Supreme Mind. And we talked with Sakharov on this subject. He was a big supporter of anthropocentrism - man is presupposed in the structure of the Universe.
Question: if this is so, if the Universe really assumes the necessity of solid bodies such as you and I, which are endowed with a brain with its gigantic capabilities, do we assume that history can turn in a negative way, that all of mankind will die?
Well, maybe, there is some other project that more advanced than ours. We are doing a lot of nonsense here, and they, perhaps, have left us far behind. So maybe the Supreme Mind will decide to close this project. But so far we have not found any sign of system competing with
our civilisation. Perhaps there isn’t one. And if there isn’t , then I think, our will continue, it seems to me. Therefore, although I think all people should understand that all of humanity may die in the future, but nevertheless, for general reasons, we are more likely to
be allowed to continue to sin further, doing things contrary to what the Supreme Mind needs.”
