Landau, An Interview

Lev Landau, laureate of a Lenin and a Nobel Prize, would like to write secondary-school textbooks on physics and mathematics.

“The first thing I will do when I get well is to try to set up a special commission at the Academy of Sciences to draw up new school curricula for eight-year instruction,” he told a Komsomolskaya Pravda correspondent. “We are teaching children as we were taught 20–30 years ago. New textbooks are needed in many subjects.”

Yesterday (22 January) he was 60 and was awarded the Order of Lenin in recognition of his great contribution to the advancement of physical science.

“No, I am not a many-sided scientist,” Landau said. “I am just a theoretical physicist. I am really interested only in natural phenomena as long as they are unknown. To investigate them is no work for me; it is great pleasure, satisfaction, tremendous joy, which cannot be compared to anything.”

The scientist regards Isaak Pomeranchuk, the physicist who died last year at the age of 53, as his favorite disciple (“How terrible that he died.”). He also mentioned Arkadi Migdal, a nuclear physicist: “He is a very, very gifted man but lazy at times.”

Landau’s favorite writer is Nikolai Gogol. He also eagerly reads Byron in the original and singles out Konstantin Simonov among Soviet prose writers. “However, this has no bearing on my work,” he said. “The world of science and the world of art are not in any way connected for me.”

Recalling his training abroad in the early 1930s, Landau spoke with great warmth about Niels Bohr, in whose institute many young, and now world famous, scientists had worked. “Nearly every day we gathered at his institute in Copenhagen and engaged in endless discussions. Incidentally, these were not discussions as such, but a form of creativity, perhaps one of its highest forms.”

Asked whether he had spoken with Einstein, Landau replied, “Yes, but little. It was difficult to speak with him since I did not interest him. Nobody interested him. He was too preoccupied with himself.”