Lev Landau
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Lev Davidovich Landau (January 22 1908 – April 1 1968) was a Soviet physicist, who made fundamental contributions to many areas of theoretical physics.
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Quotes[edit]
- Главное, делайте всё с увлечением, это страшно украшает жизнь.
- It is important to do everything with passion, it embellishes life enormously.
- in a letter to his niece Maya Bessarab, as quoted by her in Lev Landau, biography. Moscovskiy Rabochiy (Moscow Worker). 1971.
- This work contains many things which are new and interesting. Unfortunately, everything that is new is not interesting, and everything which is interesting, is not new.
- In the 1930s Landau was already saying, "I am one of the few universal physicists"; after the death of Enrico Fermi, this became "I am the last of the universal physicists".
- as reported by Anna Livanova (and as translated by J. B. Sykes), Landau: A Great Physicist and Teacher. Elsevier. 22 October 2013. p. 7. ISBN 9781483285542.
- A method is more important than a discovery, since the right method will lead to new and even more important discoveries.
- reported by Lance Dixon [2]
- People who hear of some extraordinary phenomenon start proposing to explain it with improbable hypotheses. First consider the simplest explanation: that it's all nonsense.
- reported by Boris Ioffe in: Shifman, M., ed (2013). "Lev Davidovich Landau". Under the Spell of Landau: When Theoretical Physics Was Shaping Destinies. World Scientific. pp. 5–29. ISBN 9789814436571. (quote from p. 25)
Quotes about Lev Landau[edit]
- In 1958, Landau and certain other seminar participants were highly enthusiastic about the new Heisenberg theory in which all particles arise from a universal fermion field. (Others, however, took a highly skeptical view of this theory.) At one seminar Landau received a letter through Pontecorvo, supposedly from Pauli, and Landau read it aloud. In the brief letter, Pauli wrote that he liked Heisenberg's theory, that he'd found new arguments in its favor and found it highly plausible. Moreover, wrote Pauli, the latest experiments with Λ hyperons confirm Heisenberg's theory. No details were given about these experiments, though. There was great excitement: after all, Pauli was known as a person with a critical turn of mind, far from gullible. Different hypotheses were advanced; one young theorist even went up to the board and tried to imagine what the experiment could be that Pauli wrote of. Meanwhile, Migdal took the letter, read it carefully and said, "Something's strange here. If you read the first letters of all the lines from top to bottom, it spells the Russian word 'fools.' What could that mean?" The secret was simple: The letter was written by Migdal and Pontecorvo.
- Boris Ioffe in: Shifman, M., ed (2013). "Lev Davidovich Landau". Under the Spell of Landau: When Theoretical Physics Was Shaping Destinies. World Scientific. pp. 5–29. ISBN 9789814436571. (quote from p. 13)
