Please note that the content of this book primarily consists of articles available from Wikipedia or other free sources online. Yakov Lvovich Alpert (born March 1, 1911) is a Russian physicist, whose principal field of research is space plasma physics. He was born at Ivnitsy, a village near Zhitomir, in the Ukraine. In 1928 he obtained an excellent grade in the entrance examination for the Ukranian Polytechnic Institute, but because his father, a commercial traveler, was considered not to be a worker, he was refused admission; instead, he took employment as a carpenter. In 1929 he left Zhitomir for Moscow, where he worked first as a builder''s labourer, then as a draughtsman for architectural exhibitions. He was able to get a job as a technician at the Radio Institute of the Ministry of Communications in 1931, and from that time he remained in his chosen field of physics.