I. L. KOGUTOV, Hydrogen as a Gas for Airships, State Aviation and Autotractor Publishing House, Moscow, 1932, 72 pp., 3000 copies, price 1 ruble 25 kopecks.

The book under review, as is clear from its title, has little relation to the subject matter of this journal. If, nevertheless, we consider it necessary to note it in the pages of Advances in the Physical Sciences, it is only because this book represents a kind of monument to complete physical illiteracy. This is all the more essential since, to our astonishment, the book received a favorable, almost enthusiastic assessment in No. 9 of the journal Front of Science and Technology for 1932.

In the aforementioned journal it is said: “I. Kogutov’s booklet Hydrogen as a Gas for Airships* is certainly a major contribution to our literature, poor as it is on questions of aeronautics... In a brief and concise form the author sets forth the physics of gases in general (pp. 1–31) and the actual technology of hydrogen... The basic propositions and equations are presented briefly and distinctly in the first part of the booklet and are accompanied by a sufficient number of data, numerical indicators and coefficients, so that the necessary reference material is available, and the data of the contemporary literature of the question have been taken into account... The booklet will bring substantial benefit...” and so on.

* In this and in all subsequent quotations cited in this review, all emphases (letterspaced type) are ours. — K. P.

Opening the booklet, we see that the first paragraph is entitled as follows: “Gas and the Notation Used in Measuring It.” We read:

“A gas is a substance in that state in which there is no longer cohesion between its molecules, but instead there act repulsive forces that set the molecules in continuous motion, collision, and reflection (K. P.), and are the more capable of distributing them, as a result of which they entirely (? K. P.) and uniformly fill the closed space provided to them, exerting pressure on the walls, but by themselves, without an envelope, are incapable of closing into any definite form...”

The end of this phrase is so unexpected stylistically (or, more simply, so illiterate) that one might think an error had occurred in setting the manuscript. But, judging by the fact that there are many such phrases (in the stylistic sense) in the book, here we are dealing with the author’s “peculiarities,” and not with typographical errors. More importantly, however, the beginning of the phrase contains a striking assertion about repulsive forces; this assertion is cast in such a form that from the quoted phrase it is difficult to understand its full meaning; but on p. 11 the necessary explanations are given. It says there:

“The laws of Boyle–Mariotte and Gay-Lussac and Clapeyron’s equation are entirely valid only for an ideal gas, i.e. for a weightless gas (K. P.), an imaginary one, whose particles have no mass (! K. P.), but between them there act repulsive forces determining the elasticity of the gas.”

Now everything is clear. A fantastic picture of the physics of gases is drawn quite “distinctly”: 1) the kinetic theory of matter does not exist, nor can it exist, since the particles of gas have no mass;

2) repulsive forces act between immaterial particles of gas, as a result of which the gas presses on the envelope in which it is enclosed; these same repulsive forces cause the continuous motion of the particles.

The author, fortunately, is sparing with words. Not going into explanations, he copies from a physics textbook elementary formulas and laws (we have no time to dwell on the “minor” errors that occur here, such as, for example, the assertion that the heat capacities of real gases do not depend on temperature and pressure, etc.). But then on p. 27 the author faces the problem of explaining the phenomenon of gas diffusion. With the idea of repulsive forces alone nothing can be done here; one has to resort to a bolder hypothesis about the “internal impulses of a gas.” We read:

“An example of free diffusion may be the experiment in which one glass cylinder is filled with oxygen, and another similar cylinder, turned upside down, is filled with hydrogen, the two cylinders being joined by their ground rims into one common tube; after some time both gases mix, forming a completely homogeneous mixture called detonating gas. The hydrogen in the upper cylinder, which is almost 16 times lighter than oxygen, under the influence of some internal impulse proper to each gas spread downward; oxygen, yielding its place to hydrogen, naturally could move only into the place of the hydrogen.”

Suddenly the author remembers the existence of the kinetic theory of gases and decides to devote an entire phrase (the only one in the book) to it. He writes:

“This phenomenon, where oxygen, contrary to the force of gravity, rises upward, is explained by the so-called kinetic energy of gases, thanks to which (!? K. P.) gas molecules are in continuous rectilinear-translational motion, the direction of which changes upon collisions of the molecules with one another and upon impacts against the walls of the vessel or envelope.”

If in some cases the author deals too boldly with “the contemporary literature of the question,” for the use of which he is praised by the journal Front of Science and Technology, in other cases the author, on the contrary, is overly cautious. Thus, for example, he extremely cautiously treats the idea of absolute zero of temperature. The author finds it superfluous to compare absolute temperature with “so-called kinetic energy,” and says on this question only the following (p. 10):

“Every temperature of a gas, as long as it is a gas (? K. P.), will always be above \(-273^\circ\), and therefore the temperature \(-273^\circ\) is called absolute zero.”

Fearing that he may be misunderstood, he adds:

“One must not, however, think that temperatures below \(-273^\circ\) cannot be attained; absolute zero merely indicates that at temperatures below \(-273^\circ\) substances cannot remain in a gaseous state.”

From all that has been said the conclusion is clear: I. L. Kogutov’s little book, as regards information on physics, is an exceptional work in the sense of its illiteracy. Those who have acquired it should keep it, because already tomorrow in our Soviet literature works of this kind must become a bibliographical rarity.

K. Putilov