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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