R. Millikan, Electrons ($+$ and $-$), Protons, Photons, Neutrons, and Cosmic Rays. Translated under the editorship of Prof. E. V. Shpolsky, 310 pp., 100 illus., GONTI, Editorial Office for Technical-Theoretical Literature, Moscow–Leningrad, 1939, price 9 rubles 75 kopecks, print run 6,0001.

The publication of the book under review is of the greatest importance for the history of the development of new views in the field of atomic physics, and therefore the publication of this book in Russian, although somewhat belated, is very necessary.

The author of the book is one of the largest contemporary researchers in the field of the atomic nature of matter. In the book under review he has set himself a very important and interesting task: to give a general picture of the principal contemporary experimental data on the atomic structure of matter. The most important propositions on the atomic structure of matter are directly connected with the author’s own work; in presenting the present state of atomism, the author at the same time seems to sum up the long chain of his fruitful investigations in this field.

The author tries to depict, as fully as possible, the contemporary (1934) information about the atomic nature of matter. He vividly and graphically describes the extraordinarily simple and at the same time precise experiments by which he proved the existence of the elementary electric charge.

Further, he strives to draw all the conclusions that follow from the atomism of charge. The reader is successively introduced to the structure of the atom, its electron shells, the nucleus, and, finally, to the phenomena of cosmic rays (the section on cosmic rays had become considerably outdated by the time the Russian edition appeared).

The book presents the principal experimental discoveries of recent years: the discovery of the positron, the neutron, artificial radioactivity, and so on.

The book under review sums up the results of the greatest discoveries of the twentieth century in the field of the study of the atom. It also records the general picture of atomic processes in the form in which it appears to one of the greatest experimental physicists of the present day. On becoming acquainted with this picture, the reader will discover that the author lacks any integral conception of the nature of atomic processes, and that he is faced by the quantum nature of every atomic process as by an almost insoluble problem.

The author’s physical conceptions, from which his picture of the atomic world is formed, are based on the classical propositions of Bohr’s old atomic theory.

In constructing his picture of the atomic world, the author proceeds from these propositions and at the same time everywhere emphasizes their inadequacy (the captions to Figs. 28 and 29 are curious). The impression is created that the author strives to preserve the integral classical picture of the atomic world in defiance of the experiment that demonstrates the quantum nature of atomic processes.

The monograph was written in 1934–1935; meanwhile, the foundations of modern quantum theory crystallized in 1925–1928. Thus the conclusion inevitably suggests itself that all the development of theoretical physics over the last 6–7 years has in no way been perceived by the author of the monograph under review. The author continues to regard quantum problems as unresolved, or else makes use of various particular devices of quantum theory (for example, spin), while completely ignoring its fundamental propositions.

There is no doubt that the absence of an overall picture of quantum atomic processes in one of the greatest contemporary experimentalists in this field is due to the immense difficulties that arise for anyone studying the quantum nature of the atomic world. These difficul—

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These difficulties are caused by the fact that in the atomic world the most basic physical concepts, familiar from macroscopic practice, are lost. In the book under review, therefore, we have a document that vividly illustrates these difficulties in the development of the theory of atomic processes.

The Russian translation has been made satisfactorily.

K. Nikolsky, Moscow

1. Based on materials from the Information-Bibliographic Sector of the State Scientific Library of the People’s Commissariat of Coal of the USSR. ↩