“Landau” by Maja Bessarab

I have recently read the book by Maja Bessarab, entitled “Landau”.

It is a very small book (~120 pages). As guessed, it is about Lev Davidovich Landau — his life, who he was and how he was. It is written by one of his closest friends, Maja Bessarab. Probably the most valuable information that the book contains is not even the biography of Lev Davidovich (which can easily be found even on wikipedia), but the enormous amount of close, sometimes even word-to-word conversations of Landau with various people (Bessarab, Kora Landau, Niels Bohr, Evgeniy Lifshitz, and many-many others).

I do not know if this book is available in English, but it is definitely worth looking it up. It was published by Moscovskiy Rabochiy (Moscow Worker) in 1971 (although I suspect it may have had multiple reprints, possibly by other publishers).

I will quote some of the most memorable (for me) lines from the book. Will do so in Russian, to contain the spirit of Landau’s genius.

Главное, делайте всё с увлечением, это страшно украшает жинь. (из письма автору)

Есть предметы, по которым стыдно получать оценку выше тройки. (Ландау отцу по поводу своей плохой успеваемости по предмету словестность)

Проблемы важнее решения. Решения могут устареть, а проблемы остаются. (Бор из своих лекций)

Я люблю людей, кроме пресыщенных жизнью ничтожеств. (Джон Рид)

Без экспериментаторов, теоретики скисают. (Ландау своим ученикам)

Учёба — любимое занятие женщины. Я не принадлежу к числу мужчин, которые сильный пол ставят выше слабого. Однако, если бы у меня было столько забот, сколько у вас, я бы никогда не стал физиком. (Дау двум молодым аспиранткам)

Главное в жизни — правда, и во имя правды человек должен быть беспощаден к самому себе. Правда и труд. Бойтесь растратить отпущенное вам время на мелкие, недостойные человека дела. (Ландау ученикам)

Когда имеется конечное число экспериментов и бесконечное число теорий, то существует бесконечное же количество теорий, удовлетворящих конечному числу экспериментов. (Ландау цитирует Бора своим ученикам)

- Но согласитесь, в науке ведь есть необъяснимые явления.
- Нет! Любое явление науки можно объяснить. А жульничество — нельзя. В этом и состоит разница между ними.
(Из интервью)

Главное в жизни — дерзать!

Без вдохновления нет воли, без воли нет борьбы, а без борьбы — ничтожество и произвол. (Николай Пирогов)

Верховным судьёй всякой физической теории является опыт. (Ландау, Румер, “Что такое теория относительности”)

About “Little Dorrit” by Charles Dickens

I am currently making a number of attempts at reading Dickens’ Little Dorrit. I must say that it is not that easy of job: I have been making these attempts for a second week now and I have moved only about 60 pages through the text! And even though I have a little bit of an excuse (it is exam period and hence I can pretty much only read while riding a subway) this is still exceedingly slow.

Note: Before making any further remarks, I shall warn the reader that I am not saying that the book is bad; on the contrary — I love it and there aren’t too many literature pieces that are much alike.

As it is probably very well known, Dickens is very descriptive. And by ‘descriptive’, believe me, I mean very descriptive! As an example, consider the following comparison: a ‘regular’ author would write “She threatened her son with a book in her hands”. But Dickens is not a regular author — oh, no! He would never write it in such a way. Instead, he writes:

She put two fingers between the leaves, closed the book upon them, and held it up to her son in a threatening way.

And this is a really simple example, the one that I could find by just randomly flipping the book open to write this post.

One other thing that astonished me was that the main character of the book — Little Dorrit — does not appear anywhere (not even a hint of her appearance) until page 54 (well, I shall correct myself: there is a slight mentioning of some young lady that works in the house — about two sentences, no more). Moreover, some first 40 pages, you find descriptions yet ever more! I have literally skipped a page or two a few times, because otherwise I felt that I was on the verge of putting the book away.

So I what I am trying to say is that the book is hard to attempt it is not a light reading. But the beauty of Dicken’s writing overwhelms, truly. For example, here’s a piece of how Dicken’s describes the look of one of the characters’ face:

I am
self-contained and self-reliant; your opinion is nothing to me; I have no interest in you, care nothing for you, and see and hear you with indifference — this it said plainly.

Right now I am fighting with a feeling (the instance of which has occurred to me two or three times by now) to give up “Little Dorrit”; but a few
factors restrict myself from doing so:

• It is a classics book and I wanted to read it since long ago — I simply cannot betray myself;
• By having had a pleasure of reading Dickens’ Oliver Twist, I now that Little Dorrit has got to be not worse (and possibly even better) and not brighter and possibly even darker);
• It promises to be extremely very well written, according to many. And in the ase that every one of them is wrong, I have got to check it for myself!