mollwollfumble said:
mollwollfumble said:
Lev Davidovich Landau was one of the Soviet Union’s greatest physicists, renowned for his omniscient command of the discipline, his incisive mind and his qualities as a teacher. He appeared on the scene in the 1920s, and made important contributions to nuclear theory, solid-state physics, quantum field theory and astrophysics. He is best known for his work on the theory of superfluid helium which gained him the Nobel Prize in 1962. He died in 1968.
Great biography in New Scientist. Having troubles with cut and paste on android so will add link later.
He is actually best known for the Landau and Lifshitz series of advanced Physics textbooks.
https://www.newscientist.com/article/mg12717364-800-lev-landau-utterly-repellent-or-a-kind-soul/
He is described as both “utterly repellent” and “a kind soul” in about equal measure.
Totally authoritarian.
He had no time for reading journals so got his students to do it for him.
He had a rating for physicists out of 5. He rated Newton and Einstein as 0.5, Bohr and Heisenberg as 1, and himself as 2.5, later 2.
If we believe half of what we read, Landau was utterly repellent – intemperant, impetuous, arrogant, ruthless, bigoted and egocentric. If we believe the other half, he was gentle, charming, approachable, with a good sense of humour, ‘uncommonly just and benevolent’ and ‘a great-hearted human being’. Is this the same man? Yes, he was quite a character.
Although authoritarian in manner, Landau had democratic ideals and no time for social pretensions or hypocrisy. His research groups in Kharkov and Moscow were open to anyone who could pass the forbidding ‘theoretical minimum’ exams of his own devising.
All members of his school were obliged to attend his infamous weekly seminars. Too impatient to read journals himself, Landau would assign promising papers to be studied and reported on by staff and students alike. Speakers whose performance did not come up to Landau’s exacting standards were mercilessly savaged. Woe betide anyone who became branded as a ‘pathologist’ – they were banished from his company.
Landau also classified physicists on a logarithmic scale of 1 to 5, with Einstein and Newton at .5, and Bohr, Dirac, Heisenberg and Fermi at 1. He classed himself as 2.5, later 2. He did not confine his attention (nor his classifying) to physics. History, art and cinema he loved; music, opera and ballet he despised.
Commented one former pupil, ‘You cannot imagine what a vast amount of sewage Dau cleaned out of theoretical physics.’ This drive for integrity…
In 1962 Landau lay in hospital, smashed and dying after a car accident. We read of the extraordinary rescue operation in which 87 Soviet physicists coordinated an international effort to obtain the drugs and supplies needed to save his life. They succeeded.
As the years go by Landau is valued most of all for his legacy as a teacher. His monumental work, the 10-volume Course of Theoretical Physics, over 40 years in the making, was completed by his long-time pupil and collaborator E. M. Lifshitz.
He died at age 60.