Bibliography

O. D. Khvolson. Physics of Our Time. Second edition, GIZ, Moscow–Leningrad, 1929, 382 pp., price in binding 4 rubles 10 kopecks.

A scientific book, not a textbook, usually circulates among us very slowly. The success of O. D. Khvolson’s book, which has appeared in a second edition after only a year, testifies in itself to the great need for a book of this kind and to its excellent qualities. The reader who is not a physicist, who at other times stubbornly brushes physics aside as something abstract and theoretical, is beginning with each passing year to feel ever more insistently the inevitability of acquainting himself with the great events taking place in contemporary physics. On the one hand, rumors reach him of a radical breaking-up of the foundations of the scientific worldview; on the other, into the everyday practice of the chemist, physician, and engineer there are increasingly penetrating electron and X-ray instruments, and in practice it becomes necessary to master new terms, concepts, and ideas. In this case O. D. Khvolson’s book will provide the first “quick aid.” It gives a very simple, yet adequately thorough and detailed, exposition of an enormous amount of new material. The combination of easy readability with thoroughness and unhurried presentation is a rare and characteristic feature of the work under review. Of the book’s 15 chapters, roughly half are devoted to questions of modern optics (in the broad sense of the word), and the other half mainly to the doctrine of the structure of atoms and molecules. In the new edition many additions and corrections have been made, and new articles have been introduced on the spectrum of the nebula and on the phenomenon of combinational scattering discovered by Raman, Mandelstam, and Landsberg. Perhaps the only reproach one can make against the book is that its content is narrower than its title. It contains no theory of relativity, and it speaks very briefly about what is most important for the “physics of our time,” wave mechanics. One must also regret that the exposition is not preceded by a general characterization of the new physics, of its distinctive nature and of its differences from classical physics. In its present form, O. D. Khvolson’s excellent book is not entirely self-sufficient. Much, unfortunately, the principal reader must seek elsewhere. Meanwhile, we are hardly mistaken in supposing that the reader who went through the first edition of the book was looking in it for a kind of encyclopedia of the new physics. To some extent, the indicated shortcoming would be remedied by a detailed bibliographical index of Russian popular literature on the questions not treated.

S. Vavilov