Foreign Rights contact
Doriana Rodino
phone +39 02.58.45.981
fax +39 02.58.45.98.96
rights@alphatest.it
Doriana Rodino
phone +39 02.58.45.981
fax +39 02.58.45.98.96
rights@alphatest.it
Sironi Editore® | January 2008
ISBN 978-88-518-0096-3
288 pp | € 18,00
WINNER OF THE 2009 GIOVANNI MARIA PACE AWARD FOR THE BEST ITALIAN POPULAR SCIENCE BOOK
Available translations
Translation Grant Available
For the first foreign edition
English Sample Translations
Excerpts from Ch. 5 and Ch. 7
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The book at a glance
A unique work, a close historical inquiry based on fresh KGB’s documents and interviews with the last living witnesses. The only updated biography available. Lev Landau (1908-1968) was the greatest theoretical physicist in the USSR and a legend all over the world scientific community. With Richard Feynman, he is considered the last “encyclopaedist”. He was awarded the Nobel Prize in 1962.
January 1962: Landau is injured in a car accident. The best doctors rush to Moscow from all over Europe to try and save him, but his heart stops beating. Toscano goes back telling Landau’s life through October Revolution, World War 2 and Stalinist Russia; his scientific education at the court of Bohr, Heisenberg, Pauli, and Dirac; his research and the genesis of his Course of Theoretical Physics. Extravagant, polemic and iconoclast, Landau soon became too famous and dangerous. The regime charged him of anti-soviet crimes and sent him to prison; later, despite public rewards, he could leave the country no more. Then came the car crash... The end? A miracle, and a surprise.
«This biography nicely guides the reader through all sides of Landau’s rich scientific production, never neglecting to present it primarily as a human adventure». —CERN Courier
«Thought provoking books are welcome - and this is the case of the biography of the Russian theoretical physicts Landau, a book that forces us to remember what happens when politics monitors science, using philosophical recipes that are given the status of indisputable truths» —Le Scienze (Italian edition of Scientific American)
Table of contents
1 – The cold game of destiny
2 – The Little Prince and the Revolution
3 – The Jazz Band of Leningrad
4 – A nasty boy wanders through Europe
5 – Materialistic disputes and ethereal jokes
6 – «Beware, he bites!»
7 – Char’kov poisons
8 – From stars to Lubjanka
9 – Superfluidity
10 – Slave of the bomb
11 – Thaw and isolation
12 – A miracle in Moscow, news from Stockholm
The author
With a background in theoretical physics, Fabio Toscano, specialized in fundaments and philosophy of physics and in science communication. He is a science writer for newspapers, web and TV. He wrote other successful biographies of scientists like The Genius and the Gentleman (2004), and Galileo’s Heir (2008).