31–40 of 58 posts
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Nobel prizes are highly political and random. It’s like judging programming skill by who won the startup lottery.
Say the bitter losers.
Anyone read the Livshitz-Landau textbooks? Any thoughts on them and how the compare to the Feynman Lecture series? P.S. No immediate relation to Landau (and family name is really Livshitz).
Anyone read the Livshitz-Landau textbooks? Any thoughts on them and how the compare to the Feynman Lecture series? P.S. No immediate relation to Landau (and family name is really Livshitz).
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I guess you would be relieved to learn that this civilization died decades ago, and the destroyed Buran orbiter is its tombstone.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Is that not just selection bias? Makes sense that the most gifted students at the most prestigious school over a span of 30 years went on to have great careers.
OP was questioning whether Landau’s method of identifying the most gifted students actually selected for successful physicists: “It makes me wonder of the 43 students who passed, how many achieved significant breakthroughs or Nobel prizes?” So yes, it is selection bias by definition, but the point is that the method of selection worked . Most other professors at the most prestigious schools in the world could only dr…
Anyone read the Livshitz-Landau textbooks? Any thoughts on them and how the compare to the Feynman Lecture series? P.S. No immediate relation to Landau (and family name is really Livshitz).
Landau-Livshitz books are gradual level while Feynman Lectures are undergrad level physics course. They should not be directly compared to each other.
Fairly comprehensive, highly technical but hardly inspiring or insightful. Old-fashioned, austere ( The classical theory of fields has like a handful of diagrams). The polar opposite of the "Pleasure of finding things out" of Feynman. Or the incongruous visual orgy and outright speculation of Gravitation . Of-course the interesting question is which educational / pedagogical approach works "best". Alas that is almost…
I have no doubt that visual is better than text-only and austere, by any metric, except one: filtering out those with less commitment. Laundau himself didn't have much patience for struggling to understand dense language, according to Ioffe's account: "Landau knew well all subjects (despite the fact that he almost did not read papers, only listened to their presentations) and put questions which had to be immediately…
Haven’t really read it so don’t know if its lucidity matches his undergraduate series.
Landau's Theoretical Minimum, Landau's Seminar, ITEP in the Beginning of the 1950's - https://arxiv.org/abs/hep-ph/0204295v1 "...In the worst cases, when the speaker failed a few times, he was ostracized — excluded from the list of the seminar participants, and Landau would refuse to have discussions with him, but, of course, he (the ostracized person) could attend seminars. (I remember two such cases — in one case t…
Time in GULag makes people grumpy.
He was quite a bit of an asshole before he was arrested.
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Anyone read the Livshitz-Landau textbooks? Any thoughts on them and how the compare to the Feynman Lecture series? P.S. No immediate relation to Landau (and family name is really Livshitz).