LANDAU'S "TRIUMVIRAT"

Among the many hypotheses, physical models and theories created by the physicist of genius Lev Davidovich Landau, there was one simple enough for everyone to understand. He stuck to this theory throughout his life. Every person deserves to be happy, Landau said, and that happiness is based on the simple triumvirate of work, love and friends. Lev Davidovich made this principle his cornerstone as a child and followed it throughout his life.    

Work

Nobel Prize winning Academician Landau is truly a legendary figure in world science. His genius encompassed many areas of physics at once. Quantum mechanics, solid state physics, magnetism, cryogenics, superconductivity and superfluidity, cosmic ray physics, astrophysics, hydrodynamics, quantum electrodynamics, quantum field theory, nuclear physics and elementary particle physics, the theory of chemical reactions, plasma physics - this is a far from complete list of areas to which our fellow countryman contributed. 

Landau was born into a well-to-do family in Baku, so his parents could afford to have private teachers teaching their son at home. The family had a mademoiselle; the children were taught music, languages and painting. In his early childhood, Lev showed himself to be a bright and hardworking boy but even at that time all his diligence was focused on exact sciences. Although his parents tried to make him a musician, the boy's destiny and talent decided otherwise. 

His mother Lyubov Veniaminov-na taught natural science at high school and when the future great physicist went to high school at eight, he was already good enough at exact sciences for his age. Landau went to study at the Baku Technical School of Economics at the age of 12 and entered Azerbaijan State University at 14 to study at two departments at once: the physics and mathematics department and that of chemistry. Young Lev Landau was distinguished by his enormous capacity to work. Despite his young age, he could not only study better than others and in two areas at once but he was also transferred to Leningrad University at the insistence of teachers who saw his great potential. 

At age 21, he published his fundamental work on diamagnetism which put him on a par with world-known physicists. The state sent the young genius on an 18 month research trip to continue studies in Berlin, Gottingen, Leipzig, Copenhagen, Cambridge and Zurich. Landau was travelling a lot in those years meeting other prominent scientists of that time. 

However, the fateful thirties came. The Soviet Union was preparing for war and a world revolution and prohibited its scientists to travel abroad. Landau's colleagues managed to make only one exception for him to attend Niels Bohr's lecture in Copenhagen. Landau mainly worked and taught in Moscow and Kharkiv during that period. By the end of the 1930s, he created his theory of second-order phase transitions and the theory of the intermediate state of superconductors. 

At the same time, to give himself a change, Landau would engage in astrophysics. He predicted the existence of neutron stars that were discovered a few decades later. 

In his famous bestseller A Brief History of Time, the renowned physicist Stephen Hawking says that Soviet science was isolated in the 1930s and discoveries on both sides of the "Iron Curtain" were often made simultaneously. Speaking about the cool star model developed in the West by Subrahmanyan Chandrasekhar, he writes: "A similar discovery was made about the same time by the Russian scientist Lev Davidovich Landau. This had serious implications for the ultimate fate of massive stars". 

Landau's subsequent works include his theories of superfluidity of liquid helium, quantum liquid, electron plasma oscillations, superconductivity and Fermi liquid. 

In 1962, Lev Davidovich Landau was nominated for the Nobel Prize in Physics by two scientists: Werner Heisenberg who had nominated Landau for the Nobel Prize back in 1959 and 1960, and John Pelham of the California Institute of Technology. 

Love 

Lev Landau and his wife Kora were deemed an exemplary and very famous couple in the midst of Baku and later Soviet intellectuals. So famous that they often became targets for all sorts of rumours. Lev met Kora (Konkordia Terentyevna) Drobantseva, a graduate of the department of chemistry, in the early 1930s. In 1934, they began to live together. Landau believed that lies and jealousy destroy marriage most of all. For this reason he offered his actual wife from the very outset not to sign any official documents or arrange any ceremonies. The bureaucratic elite and proponents of prudish Soviet puritanism did not like at all the fact that a Communist and world-renowned scientist had chosen that way. 

Lev and Kora had to fight off critics of other people's way of life and married officially only on 5 July 1946, a few days before their son Igor was born. 

Friends 

Lev Davidovich was not a classic movie-like genius of science: sullen, malicious and withdrawn. On the contrary, he was very open by nature, sociable, eloquent and above all he liked joking. The physicist's niece Maya Bessarab wrote in her book Thus spake Landau (Tak Govoril Landau) that "Dau (Landau) avoided didactic conversations and if he said something he did it very mildly, now in the form of a joke now a proverb so it did not look like moralizing". My son will never say that I am a bore," Dau said. 

Landau had lots of friends and one day they saved his life. I am certainly speaking about the late 1930s when the best people became victims of repression. 

Maya Bessarab writes about Landau's arrest on the night of 28 April 1938. He had leg paralysis of nervous origin and two security officers carried him over the threshold holding him under the arms. 

It was a time when Landau was working on theoretical justification of superfluidity of liquid helium and was virtually on the threshold of discovery. It was for this work that he was subsequently awarded the Nobel Prize. That behaviour of helium had been discovered by Petr Kapitsa under whom Landau had been working since 1937. Landau had many friends in the Soviet Union and abroad. Those were honest and unselfish people, physicists who helped their friend Dau always and everywhere. One of them, the great physicist Petr Kapitsa was running a huge risk writing letters asking Stalin and Beria to release their talented young colleague and on his personal responsibility. It was well known in that period that there were only two ways: either the arrested person would be released or the petitioner would be punished too. 

Kapitsa launched a long and rather dangerous campaign for the release of his leading theoretician. Niels Bohr, the patriarch of modern physics who was actually the chief physicist of that era, also stood up for his favourite disciple and friend. The case was taking a turn undesirable for the authorities and one year later Landau was released. 

His favoured friends, work and wife made the great physicist Lev Landau truly happy. In all his life, he never departed from the principle of that "triumvirate" and advocated it in every way possible.  By today, documentaries and feature films have been made about this remarkable man. His wife and those who knew him personally have passed away. Lev Landau's last friend, Nobel Prize winner Vitaly Ginzburg died five years ago. Still the cause to which Landau devoted all his life lives on because there is probably no work more worthwhile and important than understanding the universe.