Table of contents

Ten years ago the Royal Society accepted an invitation from the Academia Sinica in Peking to send a small delegation of scientists to China. One result of that visit was that for a few years we accepted several young scientists from China who wished to spend some time at a university or research establishment in this country while corresponding visits to China by scientists from Britain were welcomed by the Academia Sinica.

Meeting the formidable Edward Teller must be a daunting experience for anyone, and when Teller recently summoned the press to a conference at the American embassy in London, even the usually hardened gentlemen of the press were put in their places. But Dr Teller wears his label – the father of the H bomb – well, and his ability to smile at his own thoughts manages to dispel preconceived notions about the man.

Eighty five is a ripe old age for anyone, but the German national standards laboratory – the Physikalisch-Technische Bundesanstalt – which celebrated this birthday two months ago, has remained a young and lively institution. The laboratory was founded in 1887 on the suggestion of Werner von Siemens and Hermann von Helmholtz, but in the face of considerable resistance.

In a period of total freeze on salaries and wages it may be ironic to speak of increasing salaries but the indications before the freeze were that salaries of professional people did manage to at least keep pace with the cost of living. The Progressive Appointments Register Salary Review, published by Riley Recruitment and Placement Ltd and based on 5000 questionnaires completed during January–June 1972, revealed an average salary increase over all categories of 5.6% over the previous six monthly period, which in turn showed an increase of 6.4% over January–July 1971.

One of the most pervasive taxes ever introduced, value added tax (VAT), will come into effect on 1 April 1973. Nearly all goods and services bought or sold in the UK will come under its scope, and The Institute of Physics, despite its non profit distributing, charitable status will not escape its net.

Cooperation between universities and industry is much talked about but less often acted upon. The South Western Region of the Confederation of British Industry has done something about it and has published a Register of Industries and Colleges in the South West which should go far in spreading the word.

A prospective rate of growth in the science budget of 2% by 1974–5 is not suficient to create the resources needed to meet the challenges of the future. This is perhaps the main point made by the Council for Scientific Policy in its third and final report.

In this age of rapidly depleting natural resources the recovery of reusable materials from waste is of great value, and is becoming feasible for more and more materials. At their open day on 6 October the scientists and engineers at the DTI's Warren Spring Laboratory, Stevenage, showed off some of their equipment for dealing with waste.

In spite of dramatic publicity and shocked public reaction to those grisly motorway pileups in fog, inexorable economics reveal that it simply is not worth spending a great deal of money to prevent them. This is the somewhat curious conclusion of a survey on fog and road traffic carried out by the Transport and Road Research Laboratory.

If any subject needs a good popularizer it is high energy physics, and not only because to many trained physicists the subject has become abstruse, remote and incomprehensible. Indeed, the 'man in the street', who indirectly supports the considerable effort of probing the basic structure of matter, may be said to have a right to know what particle physicists are doing and why they are doing it.

The Councils of the Iron and Steel Institute and the Institute of Metals have agreed the terms upon which they propose to merge on 1 January 1974 to form the new Metals Society. The members of the two Institutes have been asked to approve these terms at separate meetings in London on 21 and 22 November 1972.

It is our great good fortune that the only two substances that remain liquid down to the absolute zero obey different statistics (³He: Fermi-Dirac, ⁴He: Bose-Einstein) and thus allow us to study the differing effects of quantum statistics on condensed matter. An extraordinarily diverse and luxuriant field of liquid helium work has consequently developed, particularly in the last 25 years, ranging from refrigeration applications to the behaviour of pulsars, and it is surprising to realize that the ancient controversy over whether the Bose–Einstein condensation phenomenon (BEC) is necessary and sufficient for superfluidity is still not settled.

One of the basic tenets of the band theory of ferromagnetism in the 3d transition metals is that the electrons move in an average Hartree–Fock field that is different for electrons of opposite spin. As a result the d bands are, effectively, split into two sub-bands with the electrons in each band completely polarized with respect to an appropriate axis of quantization, but in opposite senses.

There are several areas where results have reached an interesting stage. With the simple semiconductors we are learning about their behaviour under such extreme conditions as high pressures, high temperatures, large electric and magnetic fields and high light intensities.

Although the electron microscope has long served both biologists and physicists, their different interests have scarcely overlapped. This year has seen the traditional distinction between their fields of application greatly diminish as both concentrate on high resolution investigations with the instrument.

Currently, graphite producers are not operating to capacity. Hesitation in the development of nuclear reactors and a slow market in steel and aluminium production are causes.

The last 12 months have seen a further growth of interest in modern electrostatics both as an academic topic and a matter of industrial importance. The very well attended two-day 'physics in industry' seminar on electrostatics, held at the University of Southampton in April 1972, provided a new opportunity for reviewing the progress in exploiting electrostatic phenomena and for attempting to define electrostatic hazards more specifically.

As electron microscopy is now widely used in biological research, objective methods of analysing the resulting images are essential. Such methods are particularly important at high resolution, where one hopes to resolve individual macromolecules.

This year was noteworthy for the declassification of work on an alternative to magnetic confinement as a possible route to thermonuclear power. This is the use of lasers to ignite thermonuclear material.

Computers have been contributing to the solution of physical problems since von Neumann was convinced that numerical simulation would help in the understanding of the weather and pressed for the building of ENIAC. Since then, the growth in the speed, range of sizes and sophistication of computers has added much to the numerical facilities available.

Many organic dyes display strong fluorescence behaviour when excited with light in the visible or ultraviolet spectral regions. Usually the quantum efficiency of this absorption–fluorescence process is high, in some cases approaching unity.

Electronic speckle pattern interferometry is based on the use of the coherent speckle pattern effect to acquire surface data combined with the use of closed circuit television, and a special video processing unit, to extract measurement information. Developments at Loughborough have grown directly from the application of holographic interferometry (HI) for engineering measurement purposes and the electronic speckle pattern interferometer (ESPI) carries out a function exactly analogous to both time averaged HI and real time HI.

Perhaps the most notable event in the field of physics education during the last year has been the publication by Penguin Books of the greater part of the material produced by the Nuffield Advanced Physics Project team. This A level course consists of ten units of work which will be published separately so that those who wish only to make use of particular units will not be put to the expense of buying the whole package.

Anomalously intense radiation from the interstellar medium has for some years been thought to result from maser action. To account for the intensity purely in terms of ordinary spontaneous emission would require a number of molecules entirely incompatible with the densities and volumes that might reasonably be expected in view of other evidence.

Undoubtedly the most dramatic event this year on the xray astronomy scene was, paradoxically, observed by radio astronomers – the radio outburst from the xray star Cygnus X-3. On the evening of 2 September, Canadian radio astronomers at the Algonquin observatory working at a frequency of 10.5 GHz observed from the direction of this source the greatest radio outburst yet recorded.

Theoretical astronomy is in a phase of seeking to explain recent observations by existing theory – thereby testing the theory – rather than constructing much new general theory. The failure of the latest attempts to detect neutrinos from the sun poses serious problems.

Progress in a particular branch of physics is closely linked with the experiments that may be carried out. In the field of nuclear and particle physics this past year has provided numerous instances of technical innovation and development.

The last year has seen an increasing interest in very slow neutrons with energies of the order of 0.1 μeV. This region of the neutron spectrum is characterized by the fact that the neutron kinetic energy is comparable with potential energy changes when a neutron passes from vacuum into a solid or liquid or when it changes height by 1 m in the earth's gravitational field or when it experiences a change of about 1 T in the local magnetic flux density.

Over the last decade or so there has been much discussion and debate on the teaching of physics at all stages of education. There are those who would argue that physics is so clearly definable as a discipline and so extensive in content that only an intense concentration from quite an early age can lead to worthwhile knowledge of the subject and that less vigorous routes are valueless; others would claim that physics has an important, indeed essential, part to play in general education and that the problem of social responsibility of scientists might be less agonizing if a wider spectrum of those in administrative and public service had a better acquaintance with our subject.

It should be stated at the outset that this is a paper on physics, not metaphysics. Many physicists have turned to pseudophilosophy, metaphysics or parapsychology, but not the writer; at least not yet.

The 1972 Nobel prize for physics has been awarded jointly to John Bardeen, Professor of Physics and Electrical Engineering at the University of Illinois since 1951, Leon N Cooper, Professor of Physics at Brown University, Rhode Island, and John R Schrieffer, Professor of Physics at the University of Pennsylvania, for their microscopic theory of superconductivity, now known as the BCS theory. The work was a joint effort by the three men who were all at the University of Illinois at the time, Bardeen as professor of physics and electrical engineering, Cooper as a research associate and Schrieffer as a research student.

The fourth international conference on conduction and breakdown in dielectric liquids, organized by University and Trinity Colleges, Dublin, was held on 25–27 July and followed earlier meetings in Philadelphia in 1959, Durham in 1963 and Grenoble in 1968. Its purpose was to discuss the whole field of conduction and breakdown in liquids such as hydrocarbons, polar liquids and liquefied gases.

G Hohler (ed) Berlin: Springer 1971 vol 60: pp 233 price $23.70, vol 61: pp 166 price $21.20

These volumes are very similar, both consisting of essentially unrelated articles by different authors. In most cases the articles are revised versions of lectures which have been given at various summer schools.

J W Corbett and C D Watkins (eds) London: Gordon and Breach 1972 pp xvi + 470 price £9.35

I selected this book for review under the mistaken impression that it would prove to be a monograph on radiation induced defects in semiconductors, with very appropriate co-authors, James Corbett and George Watkins. An authoritative comprehensive, up to date review of this thorny but intellectually stimulating and technologically important subject is needed.

P M Morse, B T Field, H Feshback and R Wilson (eds) New York: Academic Press 1972 vol 1: pp xxi + 693 price £9.50, vol2: pp xxi + 931 price £12.60

The contents of these volumes appeared as papers in Annals of Physics in volumes 63,66 and 69, published during 1971 and early in 1972. These papers were dedicated to the memory of Amos de-Shalit, who died in September 1969, by his many friends and colleagues.

A Hermann London: MIT Press 1972 pp ix + 164 price £4.20

Although the specific achievements of the earliest phase of quantum physics, from Planck's treatment of the blackbody radiation problem to Bohr's account of the hydrogen spectrum, have long since been superseded by modern theoretical developments, there can be little doubt that this was one of the great heroic episodes in the history of physics, and this book provides a fascinating account of the intellectual struggles that accompanied the introduction and acceptance of quantum ideas into the mainstream of physical theory. From so richly detailed a narrative there is much to be learnt of the realities of scientific creativity.

S A Akhamanov and R V Khdihlov London: Gordon and Breach 1972 pp xiii + 294 price £10.20

This book is a translation of the original Russian edition which must have been published about 1964. The authors' claim to give an account of the current state of nonlinear optics must be seen against this background.

L A Vasil'ev Israel: Ketter 1971 pp v + 367 price £9.40

This is the 1971 translation, sponsored by the Israeli Program for Scientific Translations, by A Baruch, of the book which appeared in the Soviet Union in 1968. Although the translation does contain a few unorthodox terms, it is perfectly comprehensible and the production and printing are good, except for the unaccountable omissions of several lines in the early pages.

B Cockayne and D W Jones (eds) London: Academic Press 1972 pp 315 price £4

In reviewing this book, I should like to use the substance of one of the authors introductory remarks. The main reason for the predominance of oxides in electronic devices is the availability of high quality, low cost materials with large physical dimensions.

Maurice Daumas London: Batsford 1972 pp 361 price £10

One might initially be surprised at finding a book of this nature appearing under the Batsford imprint. They are after all much more well known for their superb art books.

J Hamilton and B Tromborg Oxford: Clarendon Press 1972 pp 144 price £7

This book is concerned with some of the mathematical problems associated with the partial wave dispersion relations of two body elastic scattering amplitudes. There are two separate themes: one concerns the uniqueness of the solutions when the left hand cut is specified.

J H Ferziger and H G Kaper Amsterdam: North-Holland 1972 pp xiii + 578 price Hfl 120

This book has developed out of a postgraduate course for various categories of engineers and physicists concerned with the theory of transport processes in gases. Hitherto research workers entering this field have relied heavily on two well known standard works both of which present some difficulties to the reader on account of the abstruse or condensed nature of their mathematical arguments.

E W Laing and W McFarlane Edinburgh: Oliver and Boyd 1972 pp vii + 155 price £1.75

The third in a series on Solving Problems in Physics, this book is aimed at students taking honours physics courses. The material is arranged in two parts.

J A Gard London: Mineralogical Society 1972 pp ix + 383 price £12.50

The importance of electron microscopy for the study of the widely occurring clay minerals arises from their generally finely divided nature and the technique has been extensively exploited over the last 30 years. This fairly comprehensive review concentrates on the analysis of crystal structure by selected area diffraction and the study of particle morphology.

Michael Reed and Barry Simon New York: Academic Press 1972 pp xvii + 325 price $12.50

This book is the first volume of a set of three. The remaining two, which are still in preparation, will be entitled Analysis of Operators and Operator Algebras.

Monthly round-up of new instruments, components and equipment released by industry vendors.

In the issue dated 21 September 1972 of the newspaper Le Dauphiné, which circulates in Grenoble and the neighbouring districts of France, Professor Louis Neel, one of the most distinguished physicists of our day and winner of the Nobel Prize in 1970 for his work in magnetism, gave an interview regarding the teaching of 'modern' mathematics in France. To put it mildly, he is against the large scale introduction of such methods in French schools, although he feels that a small proportion of children may benefit from abstract mathematics courses.

Although the commentary on Britain's space activities in the September issue of Physics Bulletin, p517, deals primarily with the SRC's Space Research Report 1969–70 it does give the false impression that British satellites have only been launched through NASA, namely the Ariel series. I would like to correct this by reminding readers of the British launched satellite Prospero (X3 before launch, see Physics Bulletin December 1971, p717).

The September issue of Physics Bulletin opens with the leader 'The real need: university expansion is not enough'. Sir Gordon Sutherland seems very concerned with (1) maintaining the growth rate of the university population and (2) an unfavorable comparison of British with American universities in terms of student numbers.

The introduction, with the October issue, of plastic envelopes for the despatch of Physics Bulletin has resulted in several letters received by the editorial office. In the main, these deal with disposal problems and the effect on the environment.

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