Bibliography

G. R. Noakes, A Text-book of Heat. Mac Millan, London, 1946, pp. 469.

J. M. Cork, Heat. J. Wiley & Sons, New York, 1942, pp. 494.

Before us are two books on heat, of approximately equal merit; both deserve translation into Russian, but they are of quite different character and differ considerably in style of presentation. Noakes’s book is a university textbook, and this has determined its style and character: the exposition is considerably more detailed than in Cork’s book and, if one may put it so, more fundamental; there are no bibliographical references; each chapter is accompanied by questions and problems with answers at the end of the book; there are appendices on the theory of dimensions and on the accuracy of measurements. The large size of the book is due to the detailed nature of the exposition.

Cork’s book is of an entirely different kind: the exposition is much more concise and requires more independent work from the reader for its assimilation, but it is lively, with rather extensive bibliographical references over the past ten years; there is also some historical information, mainly from thermometry.

Now as to the content itself. Both books are written for the physicist, and technology is represented in them only in summary form; the technique of experiment is treated more fully and better in Noakes’s book. In both books the exposition begins, naturally, with thermometry, including, besides thermometers of liquid, gas, thermoelement, resistance, and radiation types. Then come calorimetry, expansion due to heat, gases and vapors, and thermodynamics in the usual sense of the word; the treatment of this section in Noakes is more detailed and more serious, but still within the limits accessible to the average student. However, we cannot call this section thermodynamics in Noakes’s book, but Cork does speak of it. Next heat engines and refrigerating machines are considered; here Noakes’s exposition is noticeably fuller and more impressive than Cork’s. P. L. Kapitza’s excellent works on the production of cold are mentioned in both books, but only mentioned, without exposition. Both books describe the Debye method of obtaining very low temperatures and the properties of helium, while the superfluidity discovered by P. L. Kapitza is mentioned without the author’s name.

Heat conduction is presented more fundamentally by Noakes; he also has an extensive chapter on the thermodynamics of the atmosphere.

As for points of principle, the chief one is the relation between phenomenological thermodynamics and statistical thermodynamics. It seems to us beyond doubt that no textbook on heat should dispense with a special exposition of this question; in Cork’s book there is not a word about it, while in Noakes’s book there are only the barest elements; there is nothing in either book about fluctuations, deviations from the second law, or contradictions between statistical and phenomenological thermodynamics. If one of these books is to be translated into Russian, these questions must be introduced; it is not necessary, of course, to give an exposition of statistical mechanics, but in our opinion it is possible, without resorting to its “heavy artillery,” to give the necessary conception of it.

Bibliography

Both books make pleasant reading, especially Kork’s book. Here you will find remarks on the work of Bohr, Kramers, and Slater, and on the temperatures produced by the explosion of a wire by an electric current, and a little about the radiometer, the temperature of the Sun and planets, the mass of energy, the energy of atomic decomposition, Debye’s theory of heat capacities, and much other up-to-date information.

N. Andreev