• Corpus ID: 12500318

LANDAU ' S ATTITUDE TOWARD PHYSICS AND PHYSICISTS

@inproceedings{Lifshitz2003LANDAUS,
  title={LANDAU ' S ATTITUDE TOWARD PHYSICS AND PHYSICISTS},
  author={Evgenii Mikhailovich Lifshitz},
  year={2003}
}

• E. Lifshitz
• Published 2003
• Physics

On 22 January 1988 in Moscow, we celebrated Lev Davidovich Landau's 80th birthday in the same hall at the Institute of Physical Problems where Landau held his seminars and where I used to see him. Perhaps that is why the thought haunted me at that memorable meeting that Landau might have been among us that day, sitting there in the front row as he used to, and I expressed it in my opening remarks. But, alas, more than 27 years have already passed since Landau conducted his last seminar: On 7 January 1962, Landau met with a car accident and was disabled for the rest of his life. He died on 1 April 1968. Today only those older than 45 or so retain any personal impressions of Landau as physicist. Younger physicists and, more generally, those who had no personal contact with Landau know him mostly from his papers, many of which have not lost their freshness or become out of date with the passage of time. The large number of references to Landau's publications that one encounters in the current literature confirms this. For this reason and because of the remarkable graduate-level course in theoretical physics that Landau developed with Evgenii M. Lifshitz (a new edition is now being prepared by Lev P. Pitaevsky) Landau's contributions to physics continue to be of interest. But Landau's legacy cannot be summed up merely by recording his publications. Understandably, there is considerable interest in both Landau as a teacher and person and in his peculiarities as a physicist. One can get acquainted with these aspects of the "Landau phenomenon" from a wonderful paper by E. M. Lifshitzand also from the volume of memoirs that at last is expected to