The Schooling of Lev Landau: The European Context of Postrevolutionary Soviet Theoretical Physics (2008)
Hall, Karl (Author)
Osiris: A Research Journal Devoted to the History of Science and Its Cultural Influences
Volume: 23
Pages: 230--259
Edition Details: Volume title: “Intelligentsia Science Inside and Outside Russia”
Language: English
Theoretical physicist Lev Landau is internationally renowned for his school, whose social and intellectual coherence rests heavily on his personal agency: his brilliance, the scope of his research, his pedagogical program (textbooks and Theoretical Minimum). This essay considers the broader historical factors that made the Landau school possible and sustainable. The collective values associated with it were already in circulation in revolutionary Russia. Landau's own training took place in an atmosphere of unstable social relations that rewarded behaviors that were neither previously nor subsequently tolerated. Yet the Landau school was not sui generis Soviet. It was also the product of Russia's long-standing ties with German physics and of Landau's own intellectual development in interaction with crucial figures such as Niels Bohr. Although Landau famously claimed Bohr as his only teacher, he adopted the Bohr style in only a very restricted sense and actively discouraged his students from embracing Bohr's epistemological concerns. His school was a purely practical version of a long intelligentsia tradition.
...MoreArticle Gordin, Michael D.; Hall, Karl (2008) Introduction. Osiris: A Research Journal Devoted to the History of Science and Its Cultural Influences (p. 1).
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