Prof. O. D. KHVOLSON, Physics Course, vol. 1, 7th ed. 642 pp. GTTI, 1934. Price 20 rubles.

A review of the seventh edition of the first volume of Prof. O. D. Khvolson’s Physics Course has to be written under the fresh impression of the news of his death. A feeling of respectful admiration for the enormous capacity for work, energy, and erudition of the venerable author, well known to all physicists of our generation, comes alive with renewed force when one looks through this voluminous volume of the last composition. Having scarcely recovered from severe shocks and an illness that threatened complete loss of sight, O. D. Khvolson undertakes the preparation of a new edition of his course and writes, in effect, a new book of sixty printed sheets. This sixth edition appeared at the end of 1932, and less than a year and a half later the seventh edition of this volume has to be issued.

As the author himself states in his preface, in this new edition he set himself the goal of imbuing the book with the spirit of modern physics, taking care that V. Oswald’s sympathetic review, which had noted the first edition in 1896 as a Physics Course “permeated

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in the spirit of modernity, retained its force for the new edition as well. In other words, the issue was to replace the spirit of the physics of 1896 with the spirit of the physics of 1932. Few of the younger authors would have ventured upon this grandiose revision, which the eighty-year-old Khvolson undertook. The volume devoted to mechanics and measurements became a kind of encyclopedia of modern physics, in which, alongside classical mechanics, quantum mechanics, the theory of relativity, and atomic theory were reflected; consequently, it also became necessary to present a whole series of questions that traditionally belong to other branches of physics: the doctrine of radiant energy, the structure of the atom, the Zeeman effect, Stark effect, Raman effect, Roentgen rays, radioactivity, isotopy, etc. Since the book was conceived as the first volume of a general course of physics, information on all these questions is given in a preliminary way, so that their systematic exposition might find its place in the appropriate parts of the complete course.

O. D. Khvolson remarks at the end of the preface: “the content of this new edition of Volume I corresponds to what, in my deep conviction, must at present be presented in the first course at universities, higher educational institutions, and higher technical schools.” This remark by one of the most experienced and talented teachers, who devoted more than forty years of his activity to the reading of a university course, imposes upon all of us, teachers of physics in higher education, the obligation to think once more about the structure of teaching. The demand to introduce the exposition of these questions into the first-year course comes this time not from an enthusiastic young researcher brought up on the new physics, but from an old teacher, unable not to realize the full difficulty and responsibility of the task he sets. I shall not venture in this review to answer the question raised. I note only that, for all the consciousness with which the task is posed, I continue to be frightened by the difficulties arising on the path of its realization. O. D. Khvolson’s merit consists in the fact that he did not confine himself to putting forward this proposal, but attempted in his book to provide guidance and a practical model for solving this task. Reading O. D. Khvolson’s book makes vividly clear these difficulties. The necessity of numerous introductions and preliminary explanations, the inevitable incompleteness and lack of strictness in the exposition, the inevitability of repetitions, and a certain dissatisfaction on the part of the reader or listener—these chief dangers of the proposed modernization have not been fully eliminated in this book either, despite its author’s mastery and pedagogical tact. All this makes one attentive but also cautious about the new plan of teaching. The book by O. D. Khvolson itself is written in his customary manner, with broad coverage and full use of the scientific literature.

However, even he proved unable in some places to keep pace with the rapid development of our knowledge, so that the book bears the imprint of a certain delay in the accumulation of new material. Thus, for example, the chapter on isotopes ends with an indication of the extremely modest results of work on the separation of isotopes or the enrichment of mixtures of isotopes with one of the components, the author writing: “For the time being there can be no question of an actual separation of isotopes.” Yet somewhat earlier there are described Urey’s and others’ experiments that led to the discovery of the isotope of hydrogen and then to the enrichment of mixtures and, at the present time, have already led to the separation of heavy hydrogen and the obtaining of almost pure heavy water. It is quite natural that the new work on the nucleus is also presented somewhat fragmentarily and incompletely. There is no doubt that, had the life of this tireless worker been preserved for a few more years, we would have had the same complete and enormous encyclopedia of modern physics, written by a single author, as the one that served as a guide for several generations of physicists and bore the modest title Course of Physics by Prof. O. D. Khvolson.

Gr. Landsberg