From the Editorial Board

Beginning with the present issue, Uspekhi Fizicheskikh Nauk will publish a series of articles devoted to the thirtieth anniversary of Soviet physics. The purpose of these articles is to take stock of the exceptionally rapid development of physics in our country over the 30 years that have elapsed since the Great October Socialist Revolution—a development that continues in our own day at an ever-increasing pace.

These articles should reflect the work of Soviet scientists in the principal branches of physics, especially in those areas that have been developed most intensively in the Soviet Union. They will describe the participation of Soviet physics in socialist construction and show its place in the general progress of world science.

In view of the exceptionally large volume and variety of the material, the editorial board has been obliged to confine itself only to the main branches of physics proper, leaving aside, in particular, the numerous “extensions” of physics into related fields of technology, chemistry, biology, and so forth.

The editorial board hopes that this limitation, although it will not make it possible to outline the development of physics in our country with exhaustive completeness, will not prevent the reader from becoming acquainted with its fundamental achievements and from seeing what is new in its organization and method—features that are characteristic precisely of Soviet physics and that, in the final analysis, have determined its outstanding successes.