A. F. GOLOVIN, prof., New Thoughts on Heat and the Structure of the Solar System, Metallurgizdat, Sverdlovsk 1934; 19 pp., 100 copies, price 35 kopecks.

Only in the course of this year have reviews appeared in this journal of three illiterate books on thermodynamics: Glagolevich’s Thermodynamic Theory of Chemical Affinity, Kogutov’s Hydrogen as a Gas for Airships, and Zarafyants’s What Is Entropy. However, the small brochure under review breaks all records for the degree of its author’s obvious and outspoken illiteracy. It deserves a review only because it again draws our attention to the question of teaching staff in our higher educational institutions.

In the introduction the author admits that “the author’s mind refuses to perceive and assimilate the doctrine of heat of modern theoretical physics” (p. 3). This is the honest truth. Prof. Golovin has not assimilated even the elements of this doctrine. On pp. 6–7 he writes regarding the well-known relation for an adiabatic process

\[ \frac{T_1}{T_2}=\left(\frac{v_2}{v_1}\right)^{k-1}: \]

“The latter equality, it must be supposed, has not been verified by experiments,” and even “the author is convinced that experiments will not confirm this equality.” Similarly he writes about the relation between \(p\) and \(V\) in an adiabatic process. These equalities, verified many times directly, are a consequence of the first law of thermodynamics; suffice it to say that in an ordinary university physics laboratory students are given exercises to verify these equalities.

Further, the author (p. 15) expresses confidence in the incorrectness of the well-known expression for the efficiency coefficient of the Carnot cycle

\[ \eta=\frac{T_1-T_2}{T_1}. \]

Instead of the rejected thermodynamics he proposes something absolutely ridiculous. The basic “idea” of this construction consists in the supposition that a gas is like a spring and that thermal pressure is the consequence of the striving of rods to straighten out, and not at all of thermal motion. Having adopted along the way, so to speak, the hypothesis that the specific heats by volume of all bodies (according to the author’s new definition) are identical, the author proceeds to broad conclusions:

“The source from which the sun receives heat consists of the rotational motions of the planets about their own axes, coupled with the excitation of heat owing to internal friction, and also with the excitation of high-voltage electric fields, the discharge of which through the sun is an important source both of heat and of other kinds of solar energy” (p. 17).

“From this it follows that each planet (cyclone) of the solar system is held in its orbit not by the attraction of the sun’s mass, for the mass of the sun is negligible, but by the elastic forces of the sun, which (elastic forces) are created by the attraction of the masses of the planets” (p. 15).

Enough quotations. In essence, this book cannot even be subjected to criticism. I think it will not even do much harm, since any schoolboy will notice its absurdity. But how can the author of such a book be called a professor? What does he teach students? Why did no one in Sverdlovsk evaluate him? How could Metallurgizdat publish his book? These questions demand an urgent answer.

A. Zhukhovitsky, Moscow