Lev Landau. Genius from the USSR

Written by Rory Thornfield

In 1922, a fourteen-year-old boy from Baku began studying mathematics and physics. Seven years later, he received a scholarship and traveled to Copenhagen to work with Niels Bohr. In 1962, he received the Nobel Prize. That same day, he crashed his car and never returned to science.

The Child Who Outgrew School

Lev Landau was thirteen years old when he finished high school. A year later, he was already attending university lectures in Baku. His parents – an engineer and a doctor – raised a son who learned faster than the education system could keep up with him.

At an age when most teenagers are finishing elementary school, Landau moved to Leningrad. There, at the Physics Department, he immersed himself in theoretical physics. He defended his diploma at nineteen. For a while, he was interested in chemistry, but physics won.

Copenhagen Lessons with the Master

The Soviet government and the Rockefeller Foundation gave him money to travel abroad. Between 1929 and 1931, Landau traversed Europe – Germany, Switzerland, England. The journey had one goal: Copenhagen and Niels Bohr.

In Bohr’s laboratory, the most outstanding physicists of the era met. There, Landau worked alongside Pauli and Dirac. It was precisely these years that shaped his way of thinking about physics – not as a collection of equations, but as a living, changing reality.

Kharkiv, Moscow, and the Theory Production Machine

After returning to the USSR, Landau settled in Kharkiv. For five years, he headed the Theoretical Department of the local institute and taught students. In 1937, he was transferred to Moscow, where he assumed a similar position at the Institute for Physical Problems.

In parallel, he lectured at Moscow University. He didn’t have a classical doctorate – the USSR had temporarily abolished academic degrees, so in 1934 he received the title without writing a dissertation. His work spoke for itself.

Temperature Near Zero and the Mystery of Helium

In 1936, Landau mathematically described how matter changes abruptly – transitioning from one phase to another without intermediate stages. We call these second-order phase transitions. Two years later, Pyotr Kapitsa discovered that helium at extremely low temperatures behaves strangely – it flows without friction.

Landau took this fact and built a complete theory for it. He called it the theory of superfluidity. He showed how quantum liquids function at the atomic level. Later, he created the Fermi liquid theory – a model describing electrons in metals. With Vitaly Ginzburg, he developed the theory of superconductivity, which today we know as Ginzburg-Landau theory.

The Last Man Who Knew Everything

Landau dealt with plasma, quantum electrodynamics, neutrinos, scattering matrices. He wrote equations for every field of theoretical physics – from fluid mechanics to field theory. He was one of the last scientists who possessed such broad knowledge and could transform it into groundbreaking discoveries.

His „Course of Theoretical Physics” became a bible for generations of students around the world. There was no room in it for vague language – only clear equations and concrete explanations.

Nobel and the End of the Road

In 1962, the Nobel Committee awarded him the prize for his theory of superfluidity. Landau explained why helium II below 2.17 kelvin stops behaving like a normal liquid.

That same year, his car collided with a truck. Landau survived but never returned to work. Six years later, on April 1, 1968, he died in Moscow.

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Rory Thornfield

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Rory's grandfather left behind a wartime diary filled with accounts of a minor Burma skirmish that history books never mentioned. Reading it, Rory realized: behind every famous battle are dozens of forgotten struggles, each with its own human drama.

His preferred topics: The overlooked corners of military history – secondary campaigns, shadow battalions, local conflicts that never made headlines. From medieval sieges to twentieth-century expeditions, he focuses on the soldiers, not the generals. The people who faced impossible choices and carried those experiences forever.

Rory strips away the romanticism without losing respect for those who served. He combines tactical analysis with personal stories, examining human endurance and moral complexity rather than celebrating warfare. His writing is balanced, thoughtful, and deeply researched.

Outside work, Rory visits forgotten battlefields (now quiet farmland), photographs war memorials nobody tends anymore, and interviews veterans' families.