Lev Landau - The Road to Dubna

"Friedrich," he said, extending his hand after the car doors had closed and securing his leather bag between his legs. "Nice meeting you," he added.

I blushed but didn’t hesitate to introduce myself once again. "Riccardo. I’m a PhD student at Uppsala University."

"I see," he said before promptly ignoring me for the next hour.

We had dined at the same table during another conference just a few months earlier — but I suppose Professor Friedrich G?nnenwein didn’t have much bandwidth for remembering random doctoral students.

He remained silent, reading some handwritten notes he had pulled from his leather bag — at least until the reckless driver of our old Soviet-era car slammed on the brakes, stopping just centimeters from crashing into an oncoming truck. There were no seat belts. My backpack flew to the front seat, hitting the windshield. And in that moment, I understood why the old professor beside me kept his bag tightly secured between his legs.

The driver yelled something in Russian, then, completely unbothered by the near miss, shifted gears and sped off again.

"This should be the place where Lev Landau had the car accident that incapacitated him," G?nnenwein said, more to himself than to me.

The hanging crocodile

They say that Hero of Socialist Labor, multiple-time recipient of both the Stalin and Lenin Prizes, and, most importantly, Nobel Laureate Lev Davidovich Landau was exactly the kind of eccentric you would expect a theoretical physicist to be.

All of Landau’s biographers love to recount how he kept a large, stuffed crocodile hanging over his desk at the Kharkiv Institute of Physics and Technology—along with a sign on the door that read: "Look out: He can bite"

It was never entirely clear whether the warning referred to the crocodile or the grumpy professor himself.

The lists, the prison and some unacceptable behaviour

Now, how do I tell you about the fascinating and certainly controversial character of Lev Landau without losing your interest?

I will not list his (many) scientific achievements — you can check Wikipedia (or the list of links at the end of this article) for that. Instead, here are three lesser-known facts that can give you a good picture of the man:

• Landau loved making humorous and eccentric rankings. His "Geniuses of Physics" list ranked Isaac Newton first, followed by Einstein, Bohr, Heisenberg, Dirac, Schr?dinger, Fermi, Bose —and, of course, himself (everyone else was not intelligent enough to be a good physicist, according to him). Landau also kept a list titled "Scale of Female Attractiveness", where he rated and ranked every woman he met (a practice that would definitely be considered unacceptable today!). And then there was the List of Soviet Authorities Who Were ‘Idiots’ — which, unsurprisingly, didn’t earn him many friends in the russian government.
• By 1938, Landau was already a well-known professor and head of his university’s Department of Theoretical Physics — but that didn’t save him from the infamous Lubyanka prison. He was arrested and spent a year behind bars, accused of anti-Soviet activities (listing idiots in power probably didn’t help). Even after his release, he was never fully trusted by the Soviet authorities again. What a surprise!
• And finally, Landau was a notorious womanizer, openly seducing young female students despite being married to Kora -- a beautiful woman much younger than he was. Landau even publicly stated that he had no intention of being faithful to his wife. Not exactly an acceptable behaviour by today’s (and his contemporary) standards — but Soviet authorities didn’t seem to care. They were more concerned with his lack of commitment to communism than his personal life and view on women.

The impact of Landau's work on medical physics

So, you know, Lev Landau was a theoretical physicist and his work was focused on abstract things like condensed matter, quantum mechanics, field theory -- and thermonuclear weapons. Still, in ways Landau could not see at the time, his work has had significant implications for medical physics!

• Landau’s work on superfluidity and low-temperature physics contributed to advancements in cryogenics, which is essential for the operation of MRI - Magnetic Resonance Imaging scanners.
• His contributions to quantum electrodynamics and quantum mechanics provided a deeper understanding of particle interactions, which is fundamental for radiation therapy.
• The Landau distribution describes energy loss by charged particles passing through matter. This is critical in radiation dosimetry, which is used to measure radiation doses in cancer treatment.
• Finally, Landau’s work in statistical physics has influenced modern medical imaging techniques, including image reconstruction algorithms used in CT scans and MRI.

National Road A-104

I didn’t know much about Landau beyond what I had studied at university when Professor G?nnenwein and I nearly had that incident while traveling from Moscow to Dubna. I knew even less about the road we were on. G?nnenwein, however, was better prepared.

Constructed between 1932 and 1937 by 200,000 Gulag prisoners (Landau missed it by a year, as he was imprisoned in 1938), the Moscow Canal connects the Moskva River to the Volga. Running alongside it is National Road A-104 — the same road where, on January 7, 1962 (Christmas Day in the Orthodox tradition), Landau’s car collided with an oncoming truck.

Unlike our reckless driver (and us, onboard with him), Landau’s was not as fortunate. He was severely injured and spent two months in a coma. Though he survived, his scientific brilliance was lost forever. He never fully returned to his work, and his once razor-sharp mind never regained its former clarity. Even his legendary (!?) game of seduction came to an end.

For six long and difficult years, his wife and son cared for him—until he finally passed away in 1968.

No return

Dubna, once again. The closed nuclear city where defector Bruno Pontecorvo spent his life after slipping across the Iron Curtain, hidden in the trunk of a car. I came here for the International Seminar on Interaction of Neutrons with Nuclei (ISINN)—back then, if you wanted to study neutron-induced nuclear reactions, this was an essential stop. And as a young student eager to learn, I wasn’t going to miss the opportunity.

I didn’t know it at the time, but today I do: I will probably never return.

In memory of Professor Friedrich G?nnenwein

On October 18, 2022, Friedrich G?nnenwein passed away shortly before his 89th birthday. A professor at Tübingen University, G?nnenwein took on the responsibility of educating the public about radioactivity, nuclear fission, and nuclear reactors following the Chernobyl reactor incident in 1986.

After the fall of the Iron Curtain, he played a key role in strengthening international collaboration, fostering scientific exchange with researchers from the former Eastern Bloc throughout the 1980s and beyond.

Although he officially retired in 1998, retirement was never an option for him. They say that he remained a daily presence at the institute, actively participating in seminars, lectures and scientific discussions.

I like to remember him from that journey to Dubna and for his ferocious peer reviews, of which everyone in the field has been a victim at some point in their career.

Read more

• For those who can read Italian, I recommend this biography of Landau written by Fabio Toscano: Il fisico che visse due volte. I giorni straordinari di Lev Landau, genio sovietico
• The Obituary of Lev Davydovitch Landau (1908-1968) published by the Royal Society. Download the PDF of the original publication, it is a fascinating document to read!
• And finally a great and entertaining biography (in English!) is the collection of stories published under the title Landau: The Physicist and the Man. Definitively an engaging perspective on Landau’s life, mixing scientific achievements with personal anecdotes about Lev's unconventional personality. Fun and interesting to read.

About me

I’m passionate about radiation and radiation safety, and I lead these efforts at a top MedTech company. My experience includes working with the European Commission and international physics laboratories, where I developed my expertise in nuclear physics (without causing any explosions!). With a PhD in applied nuclear physics, I’ve published research in peer-reviewed journals and enjoy crafting content that makes complex topics in science, safety, and security accessible and engaging—because everyone loves a good science story!

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Note: a first version of this article reported the Russian spelling Kharkov. It was later corrected to the Ukrainian spelling Kharkiv. I do not actually know which spelling Landau used, at the time when he was leading the Department of Theoretical Physics at the Kharkiv Institute of Physics and Technology.