Petr Nikolayevich Lebedev (8.03.1866—14.03.1912) was a Russian experimental physicist. He was born in Moscow. In 1884 — 87 he studied at the Moscow Technical School, where he began his research in physics. He graduated from the University of Strasbourg (1891). In 1892 he began to work at Moscow University (professor from 1900). In 1911, in protest against the reactionary actions of L. Kasso, the tsarist minister of education, he left the university together with many progressive teachers and with private funds set up a new physics laboratory at the A. L. Shanyavsky City People's University.
He is known as a brilliant and virtuoso experimenter, the author of studies carried out with modest means at the limit of the technical possibilities of the time, yet striking in their deep intuition and brilliance. In 1895 he was the first to build a set of devices for generating and receiving millimetre electromagnetic waves 6 and 4 mm long, and he established their reflection, double refraction, interference and other properties. In 1899 he proved experimentally the existence of the pressure of light on solids, and in 1907 on gases, which was a direct confirmation of the electromagnetic theory of light. His experiments on light pressure brought Lebedev world fame. W. Thomson said of them: “I have fought all my life with Maxwell, refusing to accept his pressure of light, and now... Lebedev has made me surrender before his experiments.”
He also carried out original experiments on the magnetism of rotating bodies, put forward profound ideas on the nature of intermolecular forces and on the origin of the tails of comets, and worked on questions of acoustics, in particular of ultra-acoustics.
He founded the first school of physics in Russia (P. P. Lazarev, S. I. Vavilov, N. N. Andreev, V. K. Arkadyev, A. S. Predvoditelev, N. A. Kaptsov, A. R. Kolli, T. P. Kravets, V. D. Zernov, A. B. Mlodzeevsky, V. I. Romanov, K. P. Yakovlev and others). The Physical Institute of the USSR Academy of Sciences is named after him, as is a prize awarded by the Presidium of the USSR Academy of Sciences for the best work in physics.