In 1950, Vitaly Ginzburg and Lev Landau formulate at the Lebedev Institute in Moscow a phenomenological theory of superconductivity that would prove remarkably more durable and broadly applicable than its own authors anticipated. Unlike a microscopic approach starting from individual interactions between electrons — which would come later with the BCS theory of Bardeen, Cooper, and Schrieffer in 1957 — Ginzburg and Landau describe the superconducting state via a macroscopic "order parameter", a complex wave function representing the effective density of superconducting electrons and developing near the critical temperature of the phase transition. The theory manages to explain with remarkable precision the Meissner effect — the complete expulsion of magnetic field from a superconductor's interior — and, crucially, predicts and mathematically distinguishes between two fundamentally different types of superconductors according to how they respond to external magnetic fields, a distinction that would only be confirmed experimentally years later. Beyond superconductivity specifically, the theory's mathematical structure — a complex scalar field whose energy potential spontaneously favors a non-zero value below a certain critical temperature — would turn out to be exactly the same formalism that, a decade later, particle physicists such as Nambu, Goldstone, Higgs, Englert, and Brout would adapt to describe spontaneous symmetry breaking in the context of particle physics, thereby unwittingly laying the conceptual mathematical framework that would lead to the Higgs mechanism. Explicit Nobel recognition came more than five decades after the original formulation, when Landau had already died — having received his own Nobel in 1962 for different work on condensed matter — and Ginzburg, at age 87, became the oldest laureate in the history of the Nobel Prize in Physics up to that point.