Soviet physicist Lev Landau ventured into stellar theory three times during his twenties. In 1931 a hope of turning up fundamental results evidently inspired him to follow up Niels Bohr's idea that the processes powering stars violated energy conservation. Two years later, friendship with George Gamow seems to have led him to sign on to a note about the relation between stellar central temperatures and surface elemental abundances. And in 1937 worries about the intensi.cation of So-viet purges apparently motivated him to return to the stellar-energy problem. Here, as in 1931, Landau developed the view that stars have centrally condensed cores, this time proposing that such cores consist entirely of neutrons. While Landau's idea enjoyed a positive reception from Izvestiia and the Soviet Academy, this response was not suf.cient to keep him out of Soviet jails. The idea did, however, play a major role in initiating Robert Oppenheimer's research into relativistic gravitational collapse, research that would soon lead Oppenheimer to the idea of what would come to be called black holes.
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March 2007
This article was originally published in
Historical Studies in the Physical and Biological Sciences
Review Article|
March 01 2007
Landau's youthful sallies into stellar theory: Their origins, claims, and receptions
Karl Hufbauer
Karl Hufbauer
3319 37th Ave. So., Seattle WA 98144; hufbauer@u.washington.edu. I appreciate many helpful comments from Finn Aaserud, Gennady Gorelik, Karl Hall, Alexei Kojevnikov, Lewis Pyenson, Simon Werrett, and the University of Washington's History Reading Group. On this occasion, I also wish to acknowledge Russell McCormmach whose solicitation of my .rst article ended up enabling me to pursue an academic career.
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Historical Studies in the Physical and Biological Sciences (2007) 37 (2): 337–354.
Citation
Karl Hufbauer; Landau's youthful sallies into stellar theory: Their origins, claims, and receptions. Historical Studies in the Physical and Biological Sciences 1 March 2007; 37 (2): 337–354. doi: https://doi.org/10.1525/hsps.2007.37.2.337
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