Joker, rebel and Nobel laureate: what was the life of the Soviet physicist Lev Landau

Lev Landau is one of the most famous scientists in the world. But that's not the only thing that makes his personality interesting. His easy approach to life, humor and philanthropy constitute a special philosophy, which led physics to success.

Getting to know your students started with such a phrase: "My name is Dau, I hate it when my name is Lev Davidovich." Therefore, we will also continue to call it that way.

"The most interesting game"

Dow was born in 1908 in Baku. His father was an engineer and his mother was a doctor. It was they who first spurred the child's interest in science. Lyovenka's mother - that's what she called him - quickly noticed that the boy was not indifferent to mathematics.

Thanks to Maya Bessarab, Landau's acquaintance, the description favorite entertainment of a four-year-old child prodigy: “In the city garden of Baku, a tiny boy writes a long, long series of numbers on the paths, then walks along the written one and says the answer. It is immediately clear that he is busy with ordinary addition and subtraction, but for him this is the most interesting game. According to the numbers on the sand, his mother finds him, takes him by the hand and leads him home.

Parents were frightened by such a fixation of the child on mathematics. To distract him, they even tried to instill in him a new interest - playing music. But Dow hated the piano. He ran away from the piano teacher and hid in the shed where he solved examples. The parents had to give up.

However, in addition to mathematics, Dau also liked Russian literature. Only the boy hated writing essays.

Once, when the guys were asked to analyze "Eugene Onegin", Dau handed over a notebook, in which there was only one sentence: "Tatyana was a rather boring person."

Landau from childhood was distinguished by a rebellious character and disobedience, for which he and his parents were often called to the director. However, oddly enough, this did not interfere with academic performance. Having mastered mathematical analysis at the age of 13, Dau graduated from high school, and a year later he entered the university - moreover, in two directions at once: physics and chemistry. Passion for the first took over.

“I would prefer that I had not a genius, but a son”

“Landau was the youngest at the university and was very worried about it. As he walked along the corridors, he raised his shoulders and bowed his head: it seemed to him that he looked much older that way. There are so many cheerful, cheerful young men around, I so want to make friends with them, but he does not even dare to dream about it: for them he is a strange child, it is not clear how he found himself here, ” wrote Maya Bessarab.

Classmates respected him for his knowledge and ingenuity, but often laughed at the naivety and timidity of the 14-year-old teenager. However, he did not have to study with them for a long time: soon Dau had the opportunity to leave Baku and move to Leningrad, the scientific capital of Soviet Russia. There his talent was truly revealed.

True, for the sake of his passion, Dau had to sacrifice his health - sometimes he worked 15-18 hours a day, after which he suffered from insomnia.

Classmates spoke: “Often in a lecture, he thinks about something of his own. Often in the audience, he forgets to take off his cap. With professors, he behaves emphatically independently. To the examiner’s request to derive some formula, he can answer: “I’ll derive it now, but this is not relevant.”

For Dow there were no authorities. And no wonder: the personality of the young rebel was influenced by two revolutions at once - the October and quantum. The young scientist was not afraid to argue with teachers and criticize his predecessors.

Even before graduation, without asking the permission of the professors, Dau and his friends began write articles for Zeitschrift für Physik, a German scientific journal. It was there that his first work "On the Theory of the Spectra of Diatomic Molecules" was published.

Once, a mother, Lyubov Veniaminovna, came to Dau's student. She was seriously agitated by the condition of her son - he sat, surrounded by books, did not eat and did not go out into the street. Returning to Baku, she complained about this to her niece. She said: "Aunt Lyuba, Lyova is a genius." Why Lyubov Veniaminovna objected: "I would prefer that I had not a genius, but a son."

"Everyone should learn to enjoy life"

In 1927, Dau entered the graduate school of the Leningrad Institute of Physics and Technology and moved out from his aunt. Now friends could visit him more often.

With fellow students, he started a strong relationship. friendship. When they got together, they joked a lot and came up with funny theories. So they had the qualification of bores:

• First class - nasty. These are rude people, brawlers, brawlers.
• The second is the moralists. Allocate a "product" of morality - moralin.
• The third is fasting. They have a disgruntled, lean facial expression.
• Fourth - touchy. Always pouting at someone.

Humor was generally part of Dow's image. For example, while teaching at the university, he coined the term "So Spoke Landau", which he used while telling humorous stories to his students. And describing his appearance, he loved repeat: “I don’t have a physique, but a body subtraction.” Dow believed that laughter brings the same health benefits as walking in the fresh air.

The scientist was also known for his theory of happiness. He believed that everyone should enjoy life. To do this, he deduced a simple formula that contained three parameters: work, love and communication with people.

However, this easy approach to life had another side: Dow was often called infantile and immature. So, when he found out that two of his friends were secretly dating, he threw a scandal and quarreled with them. A couple in love, according to him opinion, violated the "elementary rules of friendship."

Dau also had interesting views on relationships. Even as a child, the physicist made a vow to himself never "to smoke, not to drink and not to marry." He advocated the idea of ​​free relations, believing that "a good thing will not be called marriage." Yes, yes, this expression, which has already become an aphorism, originally belonged to him!

However, later he nevertheless took a girl named Cora as his wife. This happened a few days before the birth of their common son. The couple entered into a "non-aggression pact in married life" invented by Dow. He gave the right to novels on the side.

At the same time, Landau loved Cora and wrote very touching and tender letters to her: “I remember you all the time. My beloved girl, you yourself do not understand how much you mean to me. Kisses 10ⁿ times. DAU".

"We all eat crumbs from Landau's table"

In the 1930s, Dow often visited Abroad - thanks to good studies and academic success, he received invitations from foreign universities and grants for trips to Europe.

So, after the VI Congress of Physicists, Landau, as one of the best graduate students, was sent to Berlin, and there he met Albert Einstein. Dow, with embarrassment and awkwardness, asked for permission to talk with him a little, and in the end received an invitation to his house.

“And now Leo is visiting Einstein,” writes Maya Bessarab. - Landau is twenty-one years old, Einstein is fifty. The gentle, kind, aging Einstein, who, due to his isolation, had no students, listened attentively to the young Soviet physicist. Lev tried to prove to Einstein the correctness of the basic principle of quantum mechanics - the uncertainty principle.

He was perplexed: how can a person who has made a revolution in science with the theory of relativity, cannot understand another revolutionary theory - quantum mechanics? Einstein liked Landau's ardor and conviction, as well as clear, well-formulated statements. But Lev could not convince Einstein.”

But one of the most memorable meetings took place in Copenhagen: there Dau met his idol, Niels Bohr, a Nobel laureate who made a huge contribution to the development of quantum mechanics.

"It's good that you've come! We'll learn a lot from you." stunned young Bor. He was shocked to hear such words from the lips of a legendary scientist! True, a few days later Dau found out that with this kind phrase he greets all new arrivals. But at the same time, Bohr named him one of the best students.

Dow became known to seminar participants for his ability to instantly spot errors and inaccuracies in other people's work.

Many believed that over time he would become a kind of scientific critic and nothing more. But they were wrong.

In 1930, the German journal Zeitschrift für Physik appeared article Landau "Diamagnetism of Metals", which immediately became a scientific sensation. The 22-year-old physicist was the first to show that the motion of an electron in a magnetic field could not be considered using the methods of classical mechanics, and instead offered a new description.

“We must face the truth: we all eat crumbs from Landau’s table,” said then a friend of a young scientist. After this material, many offers of work abroad rained down on Dow. But he confidently rejected them: “No! I will return to my working country and we will create the best science in the world.” And in 1932, Landau returned to the USSR.

"Theoretical Minimum"

In 1930, Dau was invited to become a teacher at the Ukrainian Institute of Physics and Technology. “He came to the first lecture in sandals on his bare feet, wide canvas trousers and a blue jacket. The suit of the young scientist made a splash. He lectured brilliantly. Excellent knowledge of the material, wit made Landau a favorite teacher, "- wrote Maya Bessarab.

However, Dow was demanding in his knowledge of the material. He developed the so-called "theoretical minimum", significantly exceeding the university program. Those wishing to pass it were offered nine exams: two in mathematics and seven in theoretical physics.

But the leadership of the institute did not recognize such pedagogical methods. Soon the rector summoned Dow to his place and insistently asked him to stick to the curriculum, to which the scientist, of course, only chuckled. As a result, Dow was fired.

Protesting against this decision, seven of his colleagues also resigned from their teaching positions. However, a month later, this trick backfired on them.

Waves of political purges swept across the country. In an atmosphere of paranoid vigilance against "enemies from within," the collective resignation of physicists was considered a blow to the Soviet system.

During the investigation, new facts surfaced: on the sidelines, scientists criticized the current government and even allegedly distributed leafletscalling for "saving socialism from the criminal Stalinist clique".

Several teachers were arrested on charges of "espionage", and one was even shot. When the NKVD officers wanted to deal with Dau, it was already too late - he hastily left for Moscow, where he got a job at the Institute of Physical Problems under the leadership of Pyotr Kapitsa. However, the escape from Kharkov did not save him, but only delayed his arrest for six months.

“They accused me of being a German spy”

In May 1938, Dow was arrested.

Pyotr Kapitsa - a respected scientist, boss and friend of Dau - wrote a letter to Stalin personally, in which he asked to be released from prison so that they could study the properties of helium together.

I had to wait a year for an answer. During this time, Dow became very hungry and lost weight. But finally he was allowed to be released. After his release from prison, he managed to quickly recover and return to work.

Kapitza already had a task for the theoretical physicist to explain the paradoxical property of liquid helium. When cooled to temperatures close to absolute zero, this substance not only does not become solid, but loses viscosity, passing into the state of superfluidity, which contradicts the available theoretical data.

In 1941, Dow became the first to smog give a quantum-theoretical explanation for this effect. In the 1950s there were several experimentsthat corroborated his assertions. This made a splash in the scientific world, and Dow gained even more popularity.

The results were so impressive that his theory became, in the words of theorist Philip Anderson, "probably the single most fruitful concept in all of solid state physics."

For this work, Dau received the Stalin Prize and was elected to the Soviet Academy of Sciences. But, despite all these privileges, respect and recognition, the charges against the scientist during his lifetime were never dropped: in the KGB files, he is still was listed as a political criminal.

Knowing this, yeah called himself a "scientific slave" and believed that in the USSR, headed by Stalin, there had long been not socialism, but a fascist dictatorship.

"I have always succeeded"

During his career, Dow wrote many scientific papers. His theories of the quantum fluid, oscillations of the electron plasma, Fermi liquids, and others made Dow's name immortal. And in 1962, for his theory of superfluidity, Lev Landau received Nobel Prize in Physics.

He made a huge contribution to many areas of physics: quantum mechanics, solid state physics, magnetism, low temperature physics, astrophysics, hydrodynamics, quantum electrodynamics, quantum theory fields.

It was said about Dau that in "the huge building of physics of the 20th century there were no locked doors for him."

He elevated quasiparticles to the number of fundamental objects of modern physics. Thanks to his work and teaching talent, he had many followers who diligently continued his work.

But in 1962, when Dow was at the height of his influence and fame, tragedy struck: his car collided with a truck. The scientist fell into a coma for two months. The restoration took several years. At first, even independent movement was difficult for him. There was no talk of work.

Injuries after a car accident made themselves felt until the end of life. In March 1968, Dow suddenly became ill. The council of doctors spoke in favor of the operation, although the patient might not have endured it.

However, she was successful, and for the first three days, Dow felt so well that they had hope for a recovery. The patient began to feed little by little, it seemed that he was on the mend. But on the fifth day rose temperature. On the sixth, my heart began to fail. Dow said he was unlikely to survive that day.

And so it happened. On April 1 he died. Dow's last words were: “I had a good life. I've always succeeded."