Bibliography

ARTHUR HAAS. Foundations of Quantum Chemistry. Translated from the German by P. V. Roman, edited by Prof. Ya. I. Frenkel. 90 pp., price 25 kopecks. Gosizdat, 1930 (series “The Newest Currents of Scientific Thought,” book 33).

One cannot but welcome the appearance of a Russian translation of this very remarkable book. Arthur Haas, professor of theoretical physics at the University of Vienna, has already demonstrated his didactic mastery in two books: Matter Waves and Quantum Mechanics, a Russian translation of the second edition of which has also only just appeared (GIZ, 1930), and Theory of the Atom (2nd edition). Especially in the second of these books the author showed his rare ability to present complex questions simply, clearly, and quite accessibly. Prof. A. Haas’s new book is a reworking of four lectures delivered by him at the Vienna Chemical-Physical Society. The composition of this audience explains the choice of material and the manner of exposition. With astonishing skill, the author has selected from the immense body of scientific material that quantum theory, with all its ramifications, has given us everything that should especially interest chemists. And in this field the material is very extensive, for physics has fully clarified a large number of questions that had remained obscure or vague for chemistry (for example, chemical affinity). It has also provided new methods for measuring certain quantities of particular importance to chemistry; it is enough to mention, at least, the spectroscopic measurement of the work of dissociation of molecules. The material presented by the author is remarkable for its completeness—seemingly not a single question of quantum chemistry of any importance has been omitted. The exposition is distinguished by clarity and simplicity. In the first lecture the author acquaints the reader with the fundamental principles of quantum theory and with certain quantitative relations that connect the various quantities playing a role in this theory; then he proceeds to the exposition of individual questions of quantum chemistry, which there is no need to enumerate.

A certain perplexity is caused by the following circumstance. The author makes no use of any mathematics, not even the most elementary. But after all, he had before him physical chemists, who cannot, without mathematics—and higher mathematics at that—get by in any case. Some use

mathematics would have untied the author’s hands and would have enabled him in places to express himself less apodictically. Meanwhile he speaks (p. 35) of differential equations and even of characteristic values of parameters and functions. Some very few passages are hardly comprehensible to readers to whom elementary mathematics allegedly need not even be presented. I shall point, as an example, to one passage (p. 32), where the author writes that, according to the statistical theory, the amplitude of light oscillations is a measure of the probability that a light quantum will arrive at a given time at a given place. Here one ought to have gone more deeply and given a few explanatory lines. It may be said that the style of the book is not everywhere strictly maintained; in places there are, as it were, interruptions.

These points, however, do not diminish the merits of this excellent book, which will probably find a wide circle of readers among us as well.

O. Khvolson