Bibliography

Max Born. Die Relativitätstheorie Einsteins und ihre physikalischen Grundlagen, VIII + 242, Berlin, Springer, 1920.

Max Born. Einstein’s Theory of Relativity and Its Physical Foundations, 222. Translation edited by A. P. Kudryavtsev, Petrograd, 1922, published by “Nauka i Shkola.”

M. Born’s little book enjoys well-deserved fame as one of the most successful popular expositions of the theory that has caused so much stir. It has gone through several editions in German and has been translated into almost all European languages. This success is explained in no small measure by the fact that the author, clearly realizing the impossibility of grasping the most basic ideas of the theory of relativity without prior acquaintance with a whole series of questions from various fields of contemporary physics, devoted the first chapters of his book to a fairly detailed exposition of the necessary information. This considerably increased the size of the book, but in return it not only made it very convenient for the insufficiently prepared reader, but also brought out with exceptional vividness the deep connection between Einstein’s ideas and the most important questions of contemporary physics.

It is therefore understandable that the appearance of this little book in Russian could only have been warmly welcomed.

However, closer acquaintance with the translation, with which the Petrograd publishing house “Nauka i Shkola” has presented us, gives rise to sorrowful reflections.

If such terminology as “the resultant acting on a particle” (p. 74) or “the eccentricity of an ellipse” (pp. 40 and 45) testifies to a certain “eccentricity” on the part of the translator, then expressions such as: “$\pi = 3.14\ldots$ is the well-known proportion of the circumference of a circle to its diameter” (p. 27), or “in a crystal... one wave is spheroid, the other—spherical” (p. 62), or “differentials of partials” (Differentialquotienten, p. 75), point to more serious defects in the apparatus of translation.

On the other hand, the translator evidently has a perfect command of German. Thus, he knows firmly that “Feder” means “pen,” and therefore he makes the ball,

fortified “on a broad steel feather” (Stahlfeder, p. 26). An incomplete knowledge of the rules of the German language (for example, nouns are written with a capital letter) even led to the creation of such a chef d’oeuvre (p. 86): “We have two essentially different methods for measuring the speed of light: the astronomical method and the terrestrial method; the first, an old Roman method, makes use of eclipses of Jupiter’s satellites...” The translator has made the astronomer Olaf Römer into a Roman!

As to its outward appearance, the book is distinguished by an abundance of misprints; for example, the chapter V heading, set in bold type, reads: “The Fundamental Wagons of Electrodynamics.” The reader must be especially hampered by the misprints in numerical data and formulas, with which almost half of them are afflicted. The transfer of the drawings to a separate sheet must be recognized as extremely unfortunate; moreover, it is so badly compiled and pasted in that using it while reading is very difficult.

Gr. Landsberg.