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Lev Landau Quotes

1908–1968 Russia

Lev Davidovich Landau (January 22 1908 – April 1 1968) was a Soviet physicist, who made fundamental contributions to many areas of theoretical physics. He received the 1962 Nobel Prize in Physics for his development of a mathematical theory of superfluidity that accounts for the properties of liquid helium II at a temperature below 2.17 K (−270.98 °C).

Russia
Academics
Nobel laureates
Physicists

Also known as: Lev Davidovich Landau

Random Lev Landau quote

8 quotes

It is important to do everything with passion, it embellishes life enormously.

A method is more important than a discovery, since the right method will lead to new and even more important discoveries.

People who hear of some extraordinary phenomenon start proposing to explain it with improbable hypotheses. First consider the simplest explanation: that it's all nonsense.

Perhaps the greatest triumph of the human genius is that one can understand things that he can no longer imagine.

The most important part of doing physics is the knowledge of approximation.

This work contains many things which are new and interesting. Unfortunately, everything that is new is not interesting, and everything which is interesting, is not new.

In the 1930s Landau was already saying, "I am one of the few universal physicists"; after the death of Enrico Fermi, this became "I am the last of the universal physicists".

The idea seems to exist that there can be an absolutely continuous transition between the liquid and crystalline state (analogous to the transition liquid-gas), which would require the existence of a miraculous state which is neither isotropic nor anisotropic.

Attribution

Quotes and notes from Wikiquote: Lev Landau (page history), available under CC BY-SA 4.0.