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.
Read more about this topic: Lev Landau
Famous quotes containing the word years:
“The years of imprisonment hardened me.... Perhaps if you have been given a moment to hold back and wait for the next blow, your emotions wouldn’t be blunted as they have been in my case. When it happens every day of your life, when that pain becomes a way of life, I no longer have the emotion of fear. ... there is no longer anything I can fear. There is nothing the government has not done to me. There isn’t any pain I haven’t known.”
—Winnie Mandela (b. 1936)
“After years of vain familiarity, some distant gesture or unconscious behavior, which we remember, speaks to us with more emphasis than the wisest or kindest words. We are sometimes made aware of a kindness long passed, and realize that there have been times when our Friends’ thoughts of us were of so pure and lofty a character that they passed over us like the winds of heaven unnoticed; when they treated us not as what we were, but as what we aspired to be.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)