Table of contents

Several university departments have recently ventured into commercial activities and this is now followed by the establishment of a small company called IC Optical Systems Ltd within Imperial College, London. The main objective of the company is to make highly specialized optical instruments and components requiring the investigation of new methods of design, manufacture, mounting and testing.

In its latest study, the Industrial Policy Group, composed of prominent British businessmen, tackles what it describes as "one of the more remarkable enigmas of the postwar world": the unsatisfactory level of output per man in British industry, which it sees as indicative of fundamental weaknesses in the economy and as proper cause for continuing anxiety. Surprisingly perhaps, the Group makes no attempt to get to the bottom of this situation but, at least in this present Paper No 6, restricts itself to disputing the case for government 'interference' in restructuring British industry.

The election of Dr Elizabeth Laverick to Council means that for the first time in the Institute and Society's history a woman will grace a seat at this 'top table'. Dr Laverick is eminently well qualified for this role, having had active experience of the academic world, of industry, both on the technical and the management side, and of professional societies.

The industrial world seems fully aware of the technical significance of amorphous materials, while the effort in the universities does not appear to match up to the "challenge of the basic physics, nor to the fact that proper foundations should be laid for the technical developments using these substances". Thus comments the Amorphous Materials Panel of the SRC Physics Committee in a report recently issued under the title The Physics of Amorphous Materials.

Current research support and training policy in mathematics is reviewed in a report by the Science Research Council's Mathematics Committee entitled The Policies and Activities of the Mathematics Committee. The report gives statistics of research grants, studentships and fellowships for the last three or four years and explains the current emphasis placed on selected fields.

This is the title of a report by Elizabeth A Wood undertaken for the Education and Manpower Division of the American Institute of Physics. American schools are very different from British ones, and much of what is said in the report is only marginally relevant to our condition.

"We are particularly impressed by the thoughtful way in which both academics and industrialists recognized the problems in initiating and developing collaboration." A working party set up by the Universities and Industry Joint Committee of the CBI, to study and make recommendations on the relationship between the universities and industry in the field of research found that many of the harsh criticisms by parties in either camp were unsubstantiated.

To accommodate the rising demand for university places in the 1970s will need extra support from government. This is just one aspect of development in higher education discussed by the Association of University Teachers in its recently published report Universities in the 1970s.

Patents are very much in the news. The Patent Cooperation Treaty was signed by 20 countries in Washington in June 1970 and this was followed closely, on 14 July, by the Banks report on the British patent system.

In 1958, on the occasion of the first conference on reactions between complex nuclei, heavy ion physics was described as a new and rapidly expanding field. The subject in fact evolved rather more slowly than was expected but it has periodically been stimulated by advances in the techniques of experimental nuclear physics.

The field ion microscope is the only instrument in existence capable of showing individual atoms on the surface of a solid. It can also be used to study the threedimensional structure of the material, by removing successive atom layers from the surface by the process of field evaporation.

Biological energy has intrigued men throughout the ages; some have written poems about the forms and shapes which contain it, others have discussed the pleasurable ways of expending it. It has been termed animal electricity or animal magnetism and is the stuff of great lovers, or the charisma of politicians.

With the increase of mechanization, noise has steadily increased. The motor vehicle and the aeroplane have had an enormous effect on the general noise level.

At one time I believed that people who could think clearly could also write clearly. This essay is about my disenchantment with this belief, and about my own method of writing papers.

P Flory Sussex: John Wiley 1969 price £8 4s

The study of chain molecules is becoming of increasing interest and importance to physicists, both because of the continued rise of importance of polymers in technology, and the fact that sufficiently well characterized samples are available to do real physics on. The basis of any work must be an understanding of the energies and configurations which the monomer molecules can take up when forming the polymer, and the resulting statistical mechanics.

K-H and A M Hellwege (Eds) Vol III/2: Elastic, Piezooptic, Electrooptic Constants and Nonlinear Dielectric Susceptibilities of Crystals R F S Hearmon and S K Kurtz Berlin: Springer 1969 price n.a.

This volume is supplementary and additional to Volume III/I which appeared about three years ago. All the tables in III/I are brought up to date by supplements in III/2 which also includes replacement graphs in cases where new data have appeared.

M Froissart (Ed.) Berlin: Springer 1970 pp viii + 393 price n.a.

The Battelle Rencontres are an attempt to bridge the gap between physics and mathematics. Some 30 physicists and mathematicians spent several weeks together in the summer of 1967 at the Battelle Seattle Centre, listening to survey lectures and research reports, and engaging in informal discussion.

M M Woolfson London: Cambridge University Press 1970 pp ix + 380 price £4 5s

The publisher's cover note describes this as "a textbook for the senior undergraduate or graduate student beginning a serious study of x-ray crystallography". A thorough grounding is certainly provided.

B Townsend London: Cambridge University Press 1970 pp vii + 227 price £3

The PAL system, adopted by the United Kingdom and most of Western Europe for public colour television, is a beautifully elegant solution to the problem of transmitting, in a band width occupied by black and white signals and with a minimum of interference to such signals, the additional information necessary to reconstruct a colour picture. It is a development of the National Television System Committee (NTSC) system that has considerable advantages over the original, both at the transmitter and the receiver.

Gunther Matz Berlin: Springer 1969 pp vii + 418 price DM 72

This is the second edition of this book and it is again published in German. Since the first edition appeared in 1953, the field of crystallization has undergone rapid development from both the theoretical and the technical points of view, and many textbooks have been written on these separate aspects of crystal growth.

Yu V Prohorov and Yu A Rozanov Berlin: Springer 1969 pp x + 401 price DM 68

This is described as a reference book on probability theory for engineers, physicists and mathematicians as well as specialists in probability theory. It contains 400 pages of definitions, statements of theorems and formulae, and a few practical examples.

International Union of Pure and Applied Chemistry London: Butterworth 1969 pp v + 465 price £2 18s

This book consists of four lectures presented at a 'microsymposium' held in Prague in 1968. All are concerned with x-ray or neutron diffraction and their results.

H Burkhardt Amsterdam: North-Holland 1969 pp viii + 289 price £7

Hugh Burkhardt's book is based on a course of lectures he gave to a class composed largely of experimentalists. He has recognized that the lack of an appropriate mathematical background usually forms a stumbling block in their case and so has devoted almost a quarter of the book to an explanation of the essentials of complex variable analysis and the properties of analytic functions.

A M Howatson London: Chapman and Hall 1969 pp xii + 371 price £3 15s

The title of this useful book is exactly right; in the fields of electrical science listed below it gives the basic principles which are important in engineering and applied physics. The treatment is theoretical but related to practical applications; the units in which quantities are expressed are made clear and there are well chosen worked examples throughout the book.

G Mollenstedt and K H Gaukler (Eds) Berlin: Springer 1969 pp xii + 107 price DM 198

The fifth international congress on x-ray optics and microanalysis was held at Tubingen University in 1968 and the 90 papers presented at the conference have now been published in this volume which maintains the high standards set by its predecessors. It would have been more appropriate for microanalysis to precede x-ray optics in the title, since fewer than 10% of the papers deal with the latter subject.

D B Montgomery Chichester: John Wiley 1969 pp xii + 312 price £6 11s

In his preface Dr Montgomery points out that this is a personal book, based on the design areas which have directly concerned him for the past ten years at the National Magnet Laboratory. The whole book reflects the author's own design philosophy which is based on the principle that simplicity is best.

B W Roos Chichester: John Wiley 1969 pp xiv + 521 price £9 7s

This book lies in the often neglected region between advanced mathematics and its application in engineering and physics, and will therefore prove very useful. It goes considerably beyond what is normally expected of British undergraduates in physics or engineering, but much of the material could usefully be taught to honours mathematics undergraduates and would follow very well the conventional 'pure' mathematics course in complex analysis.

This is probably the last function I shall perform as Chairman of the Low Temperature Group of the Institute and Society. I would find it hard to think of any function which would give me greater pleasure and which would make me feel prouder than the presentation of the Simon Memorial Prize to Prof W Meissner.

Work over several years at the Mullard Research Laboratories has produced a complete system for antilock braking on ordinary cars, demonstrated most convincingly by courtesy of the Road Research Laboratory on 2 July (figure 1). Two Rover 2000 cars were used, one fitted with the system on all four wheels, the other with normal braking.

In the July 1970 issue of Physics Bulletin (p292) Dr M R Gavin states that "Universities have existed in Europe for over 700 years and in this country for more than 600 years". The University of Oxford, however, had its beginnings in the 12th century, and some of the colleges were founded during the 13th century.

To mark the distinguished services that Prof F Y Poynton rendered to advance the teaching of physics in the City University, some former students have founded a Poynton Prize Fund. There must be many friends, both ex-students and colleagues, whom we cannot immediately trace, who would help us swell this fund, which will finance awards to students in the Department of Physics.

The article by Dr P J Black and Mr J M Ogborn in the July 1970 issue of Physics Bulletin leaves at least one question crying out to be answered: what arrangements have been made to protect the interests of the guinea pigs during the experimental phase of the scheme ? Even if the method proves to be effective in the long run, there must be some weaknesses at the present stage.

It has been pointed out to me that the statement I made in the article on digital storage technology published in the July 1970 issue of Physics Bulletin (p310) under the heading 'Optical storage techniques': "no store based on optical techniques is operating in a computer" may be misleading and I would like to make the following qualification. There are, of course, several optical storage systems operating with computers, but so far these are all for special applications.

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