Bibliography

A. S. Eddington. Stars and Atoms. Translated from the English by Prof. S. I. Vavilov. Series “The Newest Currents of Scientific Thought,” 7–8. GIZ, 1928. Pp. 152. Price 1 ruble.

The translator is right to observe that Eddington’s book is a rare event in popular-scientific literature; it is remarkable from many points of view. To present to the nonspecialist reader a whole series of the most difficult, at times quite technical, questions of physics and astrophysics, to present them in such a way that he reads the book with a sense of absorbing interest, with an awareness of the special closeness and importance of these questions—such a task requires a mastery of exposition granted to few. In this book Eddington reveals himself not as the first-rate theoretician known to the entire scholarly world, but as a remarkable stylist, entirely individual in his phrasing, in his images and words. How far we have come from the smooth, sermonizingly didactic tone and style of the popular literature of former years! In Eddington every page, every turn of phrase is characteristic and vivid, emphasized and sometimes overemphasized—evidently with the aim of keeping his reader in high tension and excitement, of not letting him tire of a hail of unexpected comparisons and unforgettable images. Explaining what a stellar magnitude is (a rather technical unit, i.e., essentially a technical rather than a “practical” unit, as in the translation), Eddington says (but the translator omits this): “You must remember that with stellar magnitudes it is the same as with the score in a golf match: the higher the number, the worse the result” (English ed., p. 32); or: “Our mistake is that, speaking of pressure in the ballrooms of stellar interiors, we have forgotten that crinolines are now out of fashion.”

There is no end to such examples in the book. Apparently this is the true approach to the modern general reader: one may do anything with him, so long as he is not bored. Given such an entirely special character of the book, as a stylistic and linguistic work, translating it is, above all, an enormous literary labor; our translator has coped with it, generally speaking, magnificently, apart from a few “wrong words” (leakage ≠ diffusion), minor omissions, and overloaded phrases (p. 89 Russian: “I think, however...≠,” English, p. 74: “I do not think ...”). The present writer took the trickiest phrases of Eddington and allowed himself the pleasure of waiting to see how the translator would get out of them; in many cases the result was decidedly good.

What is there to say about the content? What will remain with the general reader—who, presumably, will learn for the first time from this book about stellar magnitudes, Cepheids, Algol, the Balmer series, and so on—from reading Stars and Atoms, even with the absorbing interest of which I spoke at the beginning? What will he remember about calcium atoms in the chromosphere of the Sun, “which possess the remarkable art of riding on top of solar rays,” about the mass-luminosity relation; about the difficult (and still difficult, despite all the author’s “thinking” and “tinkering”) coefficient of opacity of stellar matter, and about much else—this is a peculiar psychological experiment. He will probably remember very little, but he will retain a general impression of a remarkable science and of remarkable people who throw a bridge from the atom to the star and begin to unravel questions of the structure and lifetimes of immeasurably distant celestial bodies.

If—in the whole world—he feels that this is necessary and important, that it cannot be abandoned, the book will have done its work. How much on every page of Eddington’s book is embedded with a distinctive skill, wit, and brilliance in the exposition of abstract theories, in the translation of formulas into the language of images and words—this will be understood only by the specialist reader, long since at home with the theory of stellar evolution, with the riddle of the “white dwarfs,” with the paradox of dense stars obeying the laws of ideal gases, and with the polemic between Eddington and Jeans (in hidden form, p. 120). To him this book will give special pleasure—long-familiar melodies with a multitude of new modulations. Between the two categories of readers the translator, too, throws a bridge, supplying his translation with a number of well-considered and useful notes. One comment addressed to him: his remark on p. 34 reproduces the famous table of radiation pressure as a function of stellar mass; but Eddington calculated it with mean atomic weight 4; with the “true” atomic weight 2.2 it comes out less impressive (rather less impressive, Eddington, Intern. Const. of Stars, p. 18). It is also a great pity that the author’s note on p. 30 in the translation has come out confusing (was there not a treacherous typeface shift here before the machine?). The English original is adorned with remarkable illustrations on coated paper; in the Russian edition, inserted into the text, they too are far less impressive. But, taken all together, before us is an excellent book and a great enrichment of our popular-scientific literature.

N. Idelson.