His maternal grandfather was Aleksey Nikolaevich Krylov, naval engineer, applied mathematician and memoirist, and the developer of the insubmersibility technique.

[3] In later years, his research focus was on historical demography, where he developed a number of mathematical models of the World System population hyperbolic growth and the global demographic transition.

His activities in science popularization included hosting the Russian Television program, Evident, but Incredible, starting in 1973, for which he was awarded UNESCO's Kalinga Prize for the Popularization of Science in 1979[4] and the USSR State Prize in 1980, and editing the Russian edition of Scientific American from 1982 onwards.

[8] In 2012, Kapitsa was awarded the first gold medal of the Russian Academy of Sciences for outstanding achievements in the dissemination of scientific knowledge.

In one of the last interviews he told about the closing of his TV program: "Channel One ordered me, first, to trash Soviet science, and, second, not to object against pseudoscience.

The results of their political setups could be felt today: intellectual defeat of Russia, I can't find another word for their activity... TEFI would've never turned into a one-class dictatorship before.

On February 12, 2015 the Publishing and Trading Centre Marka issued a commemorative postage stamp and a postmark with image of Sergei Kapitsa.