By M Shifman
This helpful selection of memoirs and stories on clinical actions of the main fashionable theoretical physicists belonging to the Landau tuition -- Landau, Migdal, Zeldovich, Smorodinsky, Ter-Martirosyan, Kirzhnits, Gribov, Larkin and Anselm -- are being released in English for the 1st time.
the most objective is to acquaint readers with the lifestyles and paintings of exceptional Soviet physicists who, to a wide quantity, formed theoretical physics within the 1950s-70s. Many interesting information have remained unknown past the "Iron Curtain" which used to be dismantled in simple terms with the autumn of the USSR.
Readership: scholars and academics of physics in excessive colleges and faculties.
Read or Download Under the Spell of Landau: When Theoretical Physics was Shaping Destinies PDF
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Additional resources for Under the Spell of Landau: When Theoretical Physics was Shaping Destinies
Sample text
1, p. 244). A memo from A. P. Aleksandrov shows that in March 1947 Landau had completed the theory of “nuclear piles” and jointly with Laboratory No 2 f and the Institute of Chemical Physics was doing work on developing critical-mass reactions. It’s also noted that he was directing a theoretical seminar at Laboratory No 2 ([1], Vol. 2, p. 90). Some historians of science of the post-perestroika era speculate that Landau was forced to participate in the atomic project solely for the cause of self-preservation.
He saw himself as a second-class physicist and clearly distinguished between problems he could and couldn’t solve. ” In the class of problems to which he limited himself, Landau had no difficulty in solving problems: the difficulties were only in their formulation. In the fact that Landau wouldn’t take on problems whose answer he couldn’t know in advance lay not only his strong side but also a weak side. By the same token, he would refuse to try to solve problems he saw as out of his league. It seems to me that as a result of such a modest self-assessment Landau didn’t do all he might have done (particularly in quantum field theory).
The term in jail, which lasted exactly a year, led Landau to exercise greater caution but in no way altered his socialist views and national loyalty. He actively participated in the military buildup during the Great Patriotic War (this earned him his first decoration, in 1943). Starting in the first half of 1943 (that is, practically from the very start of the atomic project), he began to perform different e The term Great Patriotic War is used in Russia to describe the period from 22 June 1941 to 9 May 1945 of World War II.