A Key to 20th Century Physics in Two Really Good Volumes

JF Ptak Science Books   Post 2458

It really is a rare thing to open a book and find it full of significant contributions by numerous people occurring in situ as it were--not an intentional collection of greats, but a "serendipitous one.  In this case the find occurred in one bound volume of the American Physical Society's Review of Modern Physics--a single volume containing two years of papers for 1945 and 1946. I've seen this a number of times--as with bound volumes for The Physical Review for 1932, and 1939 and 1948, for example--and it is always a pleasure to watch the great epic of those years roll out as you leaf your way through the volume.  

And so it happens with volume 17 and 18 of the Reviews¹, the greatest interest in this volume is no doubt the multiple blockbuster of contributors for the commemoration of Niels Bohr's birthday, in Volume 17/2, April-July 1945, pp 97-350, "In Commemoration of the Sixtieth Birthday of Niels Bohr, October Seventh, 1945”. The field is full of the major names (and Nobel Prize recipients) of physics in the 20^th century. These include Bloch, Born, Chandrasekhar, Dirac, Einstein, Feynman, Gamow, Goudsmit, Heitler, Hevesy, London, Meitner, Pauli, Rabi, Van Vleck, Weisskopf, Wheeler, and others, a full-ish list of the papers is included below. (The Wheeler-Feynman paper is significant on its own and highly cited.)

• This volume is available for purchase at the blog's bookstore, here.

The next issue is another major publication, seeing the famous “Atomic Energy for Military Purposes” published in October 1945. This is the report that caused great anxiety in the debate over its publication—eventually even General Leslie Groves came to see it as a necessity, and the work found a slightly complicated bibliographical publication history beginning in September 1945, and then in the very next month (and just six weeks after the bombing of Nagasaki) here in the Reviews of Modern Physics. It occupies pp 350-471. The Smyth Report is accompanied by “Statements Relating to the Atomic Bomb” by the British Information Services (and also a statement by Winston Churchill) outlining the British end of the project on pp 472-490.

In the next issue (18/1) we find Nobelists Bridgman (“Recent Work in the Field of High Pressure) and Chandrasekhar (“On a New Theory of Weizsaeker on the Origin of the Solar System”).

In 18/3 is a significant paper by one of the fathers of the cyclotron, M. Stanley Livingstone (“Ion Sources for Cyclotrons”) followed by J.C. Slater in 18/4 on “Microwave Electronics”.

There are many other contributors, these being (I think) the most significant.

There is just so much variety by so many stellar names...it is just remarkable, and in short the volume really is in some ways  a history of physics of 1920-1945.

The papers in the Bohr commemoration include:

• S. Goudsmit, “Random Distribution of Lines in a Plane”
• F. London. “Planck's Constant and Low Temperature Transfer”
• Louis A. Turner, “The Missing Heavy Nuclei”
• Lise Meitner, “An Attempt to Single Out Some Fission Processes of Uranium by Using the Differences in Their Energy Release”
• W. Pauli and N. Hu, “On the Strong Coupling Case for Spin-Dependent Interactions in Scalar- and Vector-Pair Theories”
• W. Heitler and P. Walsh, “Theory of Cosmic-Ray Mesons”
• Max Born, “On the Quantum Theory of Pyroelectricity”
• F. Bloch and I. I. Rabi, “Atoms in Variable Magnetic Fields”
• J. H. Van Vleck and V. F. Weisskopf, “On the Shape of Collision-Broadened Lines”
• P. A. M. Dirac, “On the Analogy Between Classical and Quantum Mechanics”
• John Archibald Wheeler and Richard Phillips Feynman, “Interaction with the Absorber as the Mechanism of Radiation”
• S. Chandrasekhar,''The Formation of Absorption Lines in a Moving Atmosphere''
• G. Gamow and G. Keller, ''A Shell Source Model for Red Giant Stars''
• Albert Einstein and Ernst G. Straus, “The Influence of the Expansion of Space on the Gravitation Fields Surrounding the Individual Stars”
• James Franck, “Photosynthetic Activity of Isolated Chloroplast''
• G. Hevesy, ''On the Effect of Roentgen Rays on Cellular Division''

Notes

1.  The single bound volume includes volume 17, Number 1, January 1945, pp 1-92; Volume 17, Numbers 2 and 3, April-July 1945, “In Commemoration of the Sixtieth Birthday of Niels Bohr, October Seventh, 1945”, pp 97-350; Volume 17, Number 4, October 1945, pp 351-490; Volume 18, Number 1, January 1946, pp 1-149; Volume 18, Number 2, April 1946, pp 151-290; Volume 18, Number 3, pp 293-440; Volume 18, Number 4, pp 441-544.

Altogether, two volumes bound in one, 490+544pp. Each issue bound with its original wrappers.