Lev Landau - Last Years

Last Years

On January 7, 1962, Landau's car collided with an oncoming truck. He was severely injured and spent two months in a coma. Although Landau recovered in many ways, his scientific creativity was destroyed, and he never returned fully to scientific work. His injuries prevented him from accepting the 1962 Nobel Prize for physics in person.

In 1965 former students and coworkers of Landau founded the Landau Institute for Theoretical Physics, located in the town of Chernogolovka near Moscow, and headed for the following three decades by Isaak Markovich Khalatnikov.

In June 1965, Lev Landau and Yevsei Liberman published a letter in the New York Times, stating that as Soviet Jews they opposed US intervention on behalf of the Student Struggle for Soviet Jewry.

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Famous quotes containing the word years:

    He took control of me for forty-five minutes. This time I’ll have control over him for the rest of his life. If he gets out fifteen years from now, I’ll know. I’ll check on him every three months through police computers. If he makes one mistake he’s going down again. I’ll make sure. I’m his worst enemy now.
    Elizabeth Wilson, U.S. crime victim. As quoted in People magazine, p. 88 (May 31, 1993)

    Time isn’t so important.... We can say that time is behind us, that we’ve had years together.... I can tell you about a thousand wonderful hours we’ve spent together because I feel we would have, inevitably. And there’s not that much difference between the future and the past.
    Kurt Neumann (1906–1958)