Bibliography

L. I. Mandelstam. Complete Collected Works. Volume II. Edited by Professor S. M. Rytov. Publishing House of the Academy of Sciences of the USSR, 1947, 396 pp., print run 3000, price 30 rubles.

The complete collected works of L. I. Mandelstam, being printed on the basis of a decree of the Government, will consist of 5 volumes. The first two volumes will contain all of L. I. Mandelstam’s original scientific works (including works published in co-authorship with other persons). The third volume will contain L. I.’s publications not belonging to the category of original scientific works: reviews, popular-science lectures and articles, etc. (To these three volumes there will be appended the collected works of N. D. Papaleksi in one volume. N. D. Papaleksi, who headed, until his death, the commission for the publication of L. I. Mandelstam’s works, included all his works written jointly with L. I. among the works of L. I. Mandelstam.) Finally, the fourth and fifth volumes will contain notes of L. I. Mandelstam’s lectures. Naturally, it proved possible most quickly to prepare for print and publish Volume II, containing L. I.’s works belonging to the period nearer to us, from 1931 to 1944. A certain part of these works had been prepared for print and published in physics journals already after L. I.’s death.

L. I. was not only an outstanding but also a “special” physicist, to whom ordinary assessments are scarcely applicable. In a brief journal review there is no possibility of characterizing his works in substance. The role of a guide for anyone who will study L. I.’s works may be played, to some extent, by articles by his collaborators and pupils devoted to separate aspects of his creative work, printed in the Izvestiya of the Academy of Sciences of the USSR (Physical Series), vol. 9, Nos. 1–2, 1945. We shall confine ourselves to a systematized enumeration of the contents of Volume II.

The volume opens with seven articles devoted to questions of nonlinear oscillations. All of them are joint works with N. D. Papaleksi. They contain the theory and the results of an experimental investigation of the phenomenon of resonance of the \(n\)-th kind, discovered by L. I. Mandelstam and N. D. Papaleksi, as well as a theory of asynchronous excitation, a presentation of results concerning the first parametric electrical machines created by L. I. and N. D., and, finally, mathematical considerations connected with the substantiation of the van der Pol method, widely used in the theory of nonlinear oscillations. To the same circle of questions belongs the work “On Parametric Regeneration,” which separates two works on the scattering of light—a question that always occupied one of the main places in Mandelstam’s creative work: “On the Question of the Scattering of Light in a Nonuniformly Heated Medium” and “Selective Scattering of Light in Mercury Vapors” (in co-authorship with G. S. Landsberg). Next come two works relating to molecular acoustics: “Remarks on the Absorption of Ultrasonic Waves in Liquids and Some Optical Phenomena Connected with It” and “On the Theory of the Absorption of Sound in Liquids” (both works in co-authorship with M. A. Leontovich). Then comes a group of works (together with N. D. Papaleksi) containing the principal results relating to the new field of radiophysics created by them—radiointerferometry. Let us give the titles of two of

these works: “Interference Methods for Studying the Propagation of Radio Waves and Their Application to the Measurement of Distances” and “Measurement of the Velocity of Propagation of Radio Waves along the Earth’s Surface.” The chronological order adopted in the Collected Works placed in the middle of this group the article “On the Refractive Index of Media with Bound and Free Electrons,” devoted to the question of the applicability of the Lorentz–Lorenz formula to a medium with free electrons. Next come L. I.’s posthumous works. One of them (together with I. E. Tamm): “The Energy–Time Uncertainty Relation in Nonrelativistic Quantum Mechanics.” Then follow two works concerning electrodynamic questions that arose in connection with the development of microwave technology (“Some Questions Connected with the Excitation of Electromagnetic Waves in Tubes,” “Radiation through an Aperture in a Resonator”). Then—a short note on group velocity in a crystal lattice and three works devoted to the theory of parametric generation of oscillations. The last work of L. I. Mandelstam is devoted to one of the questions with which he was already concerned in the first period of his scientific activity. It is entitled “The Ideal Optical Image from the Point of View of Wave Optics.”

The beginning of the publication of the Complete Collected Works of L. I. Mandelstam is a gratifying event in our scientific life, for which we must be grateful to the Commission for the publication of these works and, above all, to the editor S. M. Rytov. Unfortunately, the Publishing House of the Academy of Sciences did not show due care. There are many misprints, in addition to those indicated on the errata slip. Thus, for example, on p. 228 formula (2) is incorrectly set; on p. 331 the figure is printed upside down. Such negligence is especially unfortunate in a book that will probably be opened with interest by more than one generation of physicists.

G. Gorelik