Table of contents

Information about appointments and awards, meetings, and member services from the Institute of Physics.

A conference attempting to survey the whole of physics would seem a little anachronistic these days, and certainly a very massive undertaking. Yet, there appears to be a certain excitement in the air, an expectancy that some important advances are about to be made in the next few years in our understanding of the universe, and a conference with the aim of highlighting those areas of physics which are forging ahead most spectacularly is therefore welcome at this juncture.

There is a story, no doubt apocryphal, of an enthusiastic salesman of water, from a travelling water tank, in the early days of the American west who exhibited a placard "Our water is 99% pure". Since this corresponds to 10000 p.p.m. and human beings cannot tolerate continuously in their drinking water more than about 2000 p.p.m.

The British Oxygen Company has achieved a world lead with its expansion turbine for cryogenic temperatures. No other country has succeeded in making such a simple yet sophisticated device.

G. F. Weston London: Iliffe. 1968 Pp. ix + 374. Price £415s.

Many thermionic vacuum tubes have now been superseded by semiconductor devices but there are many cases, for example at extra high voltages, where semiconductor circuits cannot function with the simplicity of a gas-filled cold-cathode tube. Glow discharge tubes, which include those working in the corona mode, continue to be improved and still retain importance for a wide variety of purposes.

H. Clark London: Macmillan. 1968 Pp. vii + 239. Price £2

Dr Hylton Clark has written this textbook, an introduction to the theory of solid state physics, at a level which is intermediate between the usual undergraduate textbooks and the more advanced theoretical texts. Several other introductory texts at this level have already been published, of which Ziman's Principles of the Theory of Solids is perhaps the most successful.

R. S. ALGER Chichester: John Wiley. 1968 Pp. xvii + 580. Price £7 10s.

In EPR (and in its close relative NMR) there exists a peculiarly intimate connection between the spectrometer and the system under observation. A book which relates the various techniques of EPR to their manifold applications is therefore to be welcomed.

J. C. Anderson London: Chapman and Hall. 1968 Pp. viii + 248. Price £2 10s.

This book, the second by Prof. Anderson in the series Modern Electrical Studies, is intended for second and third year undergraduates and for students beginning postgraduate research. The material is presented in a simple and illuminating way and the mathematical content should present no difficulties to students at this level.

A SIRA conference held at Eastbourne 6–8 May 1968 London: Adam Hilger. 1968 Pp. vi + 206. Price £3 3s.

All but one of the 24 papers contributed to the SIRA conference of May 1968 are in this book, which thus for the first time provides a concentration of facts, opinions and argument on a theme that has agitated scientists, administrators and business men for some years. It is now an accepted axiom that innovation is the keynote for success in science based industries.

E. R. Lapwood Oxford: Pergamon Press. 1968 Pp. xi + 207. Price £3 5s.

This is a book written for physical chemists and although the content corresponds to a conventional undergraduate 'methods' course in differential equations many of the examples and exercises would not be intelligible to students without the appropriate background. The close connection between theory and practical applications maintained throughout the text is a feature to be commended since it is precisely how to apply techniques developed that weaker students find so difficult to grasp.

A. Hine London: Adam Hilger. 1968 Pp. vii + 385. Price £10 10s.

This book can honestly be described as a 'complete work' on the history, construction and correction of errors in all forms of magnetic compasses, magnetometers and allied instruments involving the magnetic principle. The late Alfred Hine, for many years an officer at the Admiralty Compass Observatory, was fortunately persuaded to commit some of his vast knowledge on this subject into one single volume before his death.

A. A. H. Scott (Ed.) London: Macmillan. 1968 Pp. 212. Price £3

This is the second collection of about 50 compact but comprehensive summaries of 'growth points' in applied science and technology, which first appeared in the journal Engineering in 1967. Each 'outline', written by or with the assistance of engineers and scientists who are closely connected with the work they describe, generally covers four pages, beginning with a 'definition' of the topic and concluding with a list of 'some centres of research and further information'.

J. J. Sheppard Jr Barking: Elsevier. 1968 Pp. xvii + 192. Price£6

The author of this book is a physical scientist who made a collection of "some experimental results from the physics, physiology and psychology of colour vision" for two reports to the Rand Corporation. These reports are the basis of this book.

A. L. Bloom Chichester: John Wiley. 1968 Pp. ix + 156. Price £4

Despite an understandable tendency on the author's part to draw his examples from the products of his firm, this is by far the most useful book on gas lasers of the several which have been published in the last few years. The basic principles of operation of the gas laser are concisely dealt with in the first chapter which also deals with the physics of gas laser operation.

H. J. Goldschmidt London: Butterworths. 1967 Pp. vii + 632. Price £10

This is a comprehensive reference book giving tabulated and listed data on the formation of alloys between transition metals on the one hand, and the interstitial elements carbon, nitrogen, boron, silicon, oxygen and hydrogen on the other. It is, however, more than a reference book; it is written by an enthusiast who has generalized on our basic understanding of the formation of the different crystal structures in a way which does not become too involved and retains the interest of the reader.

M. H. Cohen (Ed.) London: University of Chicago Press. 1968 Pp. vii + 163. Price £2 14s.

I would have found it easier to review the London Telephone Directory than this book. The Directory has a certain uniformity and a reviewer could make some general comments on the volumes as a whole.

F. A. White Chichester: John Wiley. 1968 Pp. xvi + 352. Price £7

Mass spectrometry is a fundamental technique in that the process involves ionization of part of a surface or vapour and detection of these same ions as an ion current. This differs somewhat from infrared or magnetic resonance spectroscopy where the detected quantity is an aggregate effect.

A. H. W. Beck and H. Ahmed Maidenhead: Edward Arnold. 1968 Pp. xvi + 360. Price £3 5s.

Any textbook which is orientated towards electronic devices is a welcome addition to the current literature in view of the fact that the topic is becoming more common in undergraduate courses particularly those in electronic engineering. In the book under review the authors state that it is their aim to provide an introduction to the subject of physical electronics at the level of 2nd and 3rd year undergraduate courses in electronic engineering but unfortunately in some rather important aspects it has fallen short of this aim.

J. W. Martin Oxford: Pergamon Press. 1968 Pp. xii + 231. Price £2 (hardback), £1 10s. (paperback)

This little volume is interesting for three reasons: it represents the last editorial venture of that distinguished metallurgist, William Hume-Rothery, who died last autumn; it is a useful didactic text on precipitation hardening for undergraduates; and most important, it is the first exemplar of a new concept in writing textbooks, with implications which are in no way specific to metallurgy. In his editorial introduction, Prof. Hume-Rothery deplores the practice of spoon-feeding information which is intrinsic to the normal textbook, and urges the necessity of encouraging students to consult original sources and to judge for themselves the value of these sources in arriving at a critical assessment of the field.

D. Lurie Chichester: John Wiley. 1968 Pp. xii + 506. Price £7

This is a useful introductory textbook, at the graduate student level, to the formal apparatus of the quantum theory of fields. The contents include: relativistic one particle equations; Lagrangian field theory; quantum fields; quantization of spin 1 and spin 3/2 fields; interacting quantum fields; perturbation theory; vacuum expectation values and the S-matrix; currents, coupling constants, and sum rules; bound states; and the functional method.

G. H. Stewart (Ed.) Stoke on Trent: British Ceramic Society. 1968 Pp. 481. Price £5 5s.

The previous 'Science of ceramics' volumes represented the proceedings of joint meetings of the British and Netherlands Ceramic Societies. The full international flavour of these meetings, now held under the auspices of the European Ceramic Association, is illustrated by the fact that only 9 of the 31 papers of the present volume emanate from the UK: 4 are from USSR and 2 from USA; Czechoslovakia and Yugoslavia are represented and the remaining papers are contributed by the western European countires.

R. S. Nelson Amsterdam: North Holland. 1968 Pp. x + 281. Price £5 17s.

The work of the author and his colleagues at AERE, Harwell, is well known to others studying the phenomena of sputtering and channelling in solids. The book principally describes the results of experiments, many the work of the author, in the fields covered by the title.

J. E. Thompson Feltham: Newnes Books. 1968 Pp. vii + 173. Price £3 3s.

There is no doubt that the appearance of such a series of monographs is timely and that there is a need for a comprehensive review of magnetic materials and their applications. This book deals with grain-oriented silicon iron, ferrites, high permeability materials, thin ferromagnetic films and permanent magnets in five separate sections, each between 20 and 30 pages long and thus shorter than review articles which appear regularly in both specialist and nonspecialist journals.

The second Science Bulletin issued by the Department of Education and Science deals with the interchange of students and senior scientists between countries. After a general introduction it discusses the various schemes promoted by the Research Councils, the Royal Society, the British Council and other organizations, for support of scientists wishing to study or work in universities and research establishments abroad.

Founded in 1740 by the family of Davis in Chancery Lane, Taylor & Francis Ltd have, for many years, served the world of science and learning and earned for themselves an international reputation as scientific publishers and printers. Once the home of the notorious Bishop Bonner, the building in Red Lion Court, Fleet Street, is one of the oldest in the City — certainly the oldest printing establishment.

Mr Anthony Wedgwood Benn, the Minister of Technology, has suggested that the House of Commons would benefit greatly by having 50 engineers to "ensure that parliamentary discussion was more closely geared to the technical realities of the time". Opening the new Chemical Engineering Building at the University of Bradford on 25 April 1969, Mr Wedgwood Benn said that there were far too few engineers and scientists in public affairs.

Many physicists, in common with other technologists and scientific workers, have to accept a burden of administrative tasks which often include responsibility for the costs and duration of projects in addition to the technical aspects. If they are employed in competitive industry, or working within the restrictions of small budgets, they have to realize that the days when projects were planned by drawing a few simple lines against a timescale on a piece of graph paper are now dead and gone.

The new University of Glasgow Observatory was recently opened by the Astronomer Royal for Scotland, Prof. H. A. Bruck. It is the fourth of a series which began with the founding of the Chair of Astronomy in 1760.

'On the effecting of all things possible' is to be this year's Presidential Address given by Sir Peter Medawar at the 131st annual meeting of the British Association for the Advancement of Science, which will be held at Exeter on 3–10 September 1969. In his address Sir Peter will deal with the defence of science against the despondent voices which question its role in modern civilization, and with the related question of why the 19th century assumption that science and technology were the allies of civilization seems no longer to be widely believed.

Bone regarded as a composite structural engineering material was something of a novelty to physicists who listened to Prof. J.E. Gordon's lecture on 'Fibre reinforced materials' at Reading University on 25 April. In discussing the limitations of bone he gave his opinion that we were unlikely to see an elephant jumping over a gate! This well attended meeting was one of the most successful of the year for the London and Home Counties Branch of the Institute and Society and was accompanied by a conversazione at which exhibits of fibres were given from the AERE, ERDE and RAE.

The American Institute of Physics has published the Survey of 1968 Physics Bachelor's Degree Recipients and the 1967–1968 Graduate Student Survey. The reports indicate that the fraction of physics graduates planning immediate entry to postgraduate school to continue their study of physics dropped from 55% in previous years to 44% in 1968. The fraction planning to accept employment rose from 26% in 1967 to 40% in 1968.

The Physics Committee of the Science Research Council's University Science and Technology Board has set up a Panel under the Chairmanship of Prof. S.F. Edwards to "consider the current and likely future research activity and interest in the study of amorphous materials (including glasses and liquids) and to make recommendations on the desired level of support required in this area from SRC resources". The Panel wishes to obtain the views of people actively studying and interested in amorphous materials in the universities, industry and government departments.

A conference on the 'Physics of liquids', sponsored by the Solid State Physics Sub-Committee of the Institute and Society, was held in the University of East Anglia on 5–18 April 1969. The conference was attended by over 180 scientists, nearly a third of whom were from overseas.

Over 200 delegates attended a one day conference on electronic display systems held at the University of Birmingham on 25 March and organized jointly by the Midland Branch, the Electronics Group and the Royal Television Society. Those present, representing industrial and Government research establishments, universities and technical colleges throughout the United Kingdom, included also representatives from firms in France, Germany and Holland.

The note in the Secretary's column of the April issue of Physics Bulletin (p. 122) concerning the number of women Members of the Institute and Society inevitably leads one to ask what the Institute and Society is doing to encourage women physicists to join and to remain Members and, more importantly, what effort is being made to encourage more girls to study physics at school and to enter careers in the physical sciences and engineering. For women in permanent full time employment in the universities or in industry, the reasons for applying for Membership are the same as for their male colleagues and no special inducement need, or should, be offered.

In response to your request for feedback from readers I should like to comment on Dr E. Rudd's article on the 'brain drain' (Physics Bulletin January 1969 p. 13). I feel he is quite correct in assuming that the universities are training more PhDs than they can employ, and as these PhDs are not very interested in industry (nor industry in them) the only alternative is emigration.

Dr E. Eastwood's article in the April issue of Physics Bulletin (p. 131) is a timely contribution to the debate about the relationship between the universities and industry, if only because it reveals how wide the gap still is between the two sides. After some years of attempting in small ways to bridge it, I regretfully acknowledge that differences exist both in assessing responsibility for the situation and in the remedies proposed.

Contrary to experience after circulating the overall proposals for a Royal Charter last November, very few comments have been received by correspondence since the proposed amendments to those proposals were published in the April issue of Physics Bulletin. It is therefore feasible to publish the few comments received to date and these appear below.