Bibliography

S. Ramo and J. Whinnery. Fields and Waves in Modern Radio Engineering. Translated from the English under the editorship of Yu. B. Kobzarev. State Publishing House of Technical-Theoretical Literature, Moscow—Leningrad, 1948, 631 pp., price 25 rubles, print run 10,000 copies.

The rapid development of the application of centimeter waves in practical radio engineering has required radio engineers and radiophysicists to become thoroughly acquainted with the theory of the electromagnetic field and with methods for solving rather complex electrodynamic problems.

A radiophysicist working in the field of long waves, when calculating his apparatus, is content with the concepts of lumped parameters of an electrical circuit; a short-wave radio engineer is quite satisfied with the theory of long lines with distributed parameters, in which the concepts of current and voltage have completely displaced ideas about electromagnetic fields; but a worker in the field of centimeter waves, where all dimensions of the apparatus are comparable with the wavelength, literally cannot take a single step without using concepts of the electromagnetic field.

Methods for calculating long lines, brought to a high degree of perfection, prove insufficient when calculating waveguides or cavity resonators; the simple mathematical operations familiar to the radio engineer of former years are replaced by more complex methods requiring familiarity with branches of mathematics that in earlier radio engineering were almost never used (especially by practitioners).

As is well known, the development of centimeter-wave radio engineering, which posed a whole series of new electrodynamic problems, led to a revision of courses in electrodynamics. Such books as Stratton’s Electromagnetic Theory, which has recently appeared in Russian, or Schelkunoff’s Electromagnetic Waves, a book well deserving translation and intended for radiophysicists working in the microwave field, differ substantially, for example, from Professor Tamm’s excellent course in electrodynamics, which is intended for physicists “in general,” and not for radio specialists.

But if the books by Tamm and Stratton, which give an impeccably rigorous exposition of electrodynamics, require the reader to have a mathematical background of university type, then the book under review, intended for the rank-and-file radio engineer, assumes a much smaller preparation in mathematics. Without claiming complete rigor, the book acquaints the reader with methods for solving electrodynamic problems directly connected with practice; the book does not overload one with mathematics, but at the same time is free from the vulgarization and outright errors encountered, for example, in Spilling’s recently published book Introduction to the Theory of Electromagnetic Waves.

The well-chosen exercises scattered throughout the book greatly help in mastering the material, deepen and in every respect clarify the formulations of the main text.

The book begins with a reminder of the basic methods of considering circuits with lumped constants and long lines, which the author considers partly familiar to the reader.

Then come two chapters devoted to the theory of static fields and methods for solving static problems.

Next Maxwell’s equations are presented, the potentials used in solving electrodynamic problems are considered, and boundary conditions for variable fields are derived.

Here the author compares various systems of units (in the preceding chapters he used the absolute system), arrives at the correct conclusion that for radio engineering the MKS system is the most suitable, and thereafter uses only it.

This peculiar device, which seems to me entirely correct from the methodological point of view, allows the beginning reader, when working through the first chapters, to use the units in which he was taught at the university; the better-prepared reader, working through the later chapters, gradually becomes accustomed to a system of units convenient in practice.

Chapter 5, in which the author, comparing field theory with the theory of long lines, explains the approximate character of the latter and defines its applicability in the case of high frequencies, will be of great use not only to engineers accustomed to trusting the theory of long lines, but also to physicists, who usually remember better the approximate nature of this theory.

Next the author considers the skin effect (which will be needed in constructing the theory of waveguides) and waves in unbounded space. After introducing the idea of guided waves, the author briefly sets forth the principal properties of waveguides, in detail and very interestingly developed in Chapter 8.

The tenth chapter is devoted to cavity resonators. As in other cases, the author outlines a number of analogies between the new concept (the resonator) and the familiar old one (the circuit), and skillfully emphasizes the limit of applicability of the analogy.

The last chapter is devoted to questions of radio-device radiation.

The author does not claim completeness in the exposition of all the questions touched upon, nor a diversity of practical illustrations.

The reader who has thoroughly studied the book will be able without difficulty to understand both more rigorous theoretical works and the content of articles of a practical character. This ability to lead the reader toward independent work is the value of the book.

The bibliographic references in the book are very few; Russian works are entirely absent. To some (rather small) extent this shortcoming has been corrected by the editor. Not to mention a number of articles that deserve mention in the book, the list of literature should have been supplemented with Krasnoy’s book by Pistol’kors, Antennas, and with the books of Tatarinov, Neiman, Aseev, and others.

The translation has been done well. Published quite respectably, this book will be of great benefit to persons working in the field of microwaves. Nevertheless, one would like to express two wishes: first, that such books appearing in Russian be written by Soviet authors; secondly, that when translated books are published, the time gap between the appearance of the original and of the translation be measured not in years (the translation under review was 4 years late), but in months.

N. Malov