Table of contents

The article in the September issue of Physics Bulletin (p423) on the 'meson factory' at SIN prompts me to raise a question in the difficult area of social responsibility. It is not unusual for the scientist to be accused of indifference to the potential harm of his discoveries, but here we have a problem arising from the potential benefit.

The suggestion in the September issue of Physics Bulletin (p395) by Richard Forbes and David Weaver that physicists should be able to register as chartered engineers is surely the product of confused thinking. If a physicist is practising engineering, he has the option of joining the appropriate engineering institution and achieving professional recognition and chartered status through this route.

Friedrich Hasenöhrl (1874–1915) who by means of the thought experiment named after him first established the proportionality between inertial mass and energy was not of German nationality, as could be wrongly concluded from Dr Aspden's letter in the April issue of Physics Bulletin (p149), but he was an Austrian who taught in Vienna. In his letter in the July issue of Physics Bulletin (p301) Professor Jennison states that Hasenöhrl did not explicitly claim the discovery of a mechanism explaining inertia.

Recent letters in Physics Bulletin have left the impression that universities are not in general interested in becoming involved with the scientific and technical problems of industry. That such a conclusion is not valid is suggested by the fact that the majority of universities in the UK have set up special departments charged with the responsibility of creating an effective academic/industrial interface.

I should like to comment on Mr R E Blackith's letter in the July issue of Physics Bulletin (p302) under the heading 'Cancer risk at Windscale'. The comments of The Guardian on NRPB-R54 to which Mr Blackith refers were challenged by the Director of NRPB.

In his provocative support for Dr Hird's plea (Physics Bulletin May 1977 p199) that in speaking and writing to people who do not have a good command of English, one should use simple rather than poetic English, Professor Ziman (Physics Bulletin July 1977 p299) presumably does not propose the use of 'broken English' that is deliberately imperfect or with the syntax incomplete. Although errors of grammar, syntax or pronunciation should be forgiven in those for whom English is not a mother tongue, the 'native' should follow the advice of Sir Ernest Gowers who wrote in Plain Words (HMSO 1948 p34):

Can I urge The Institute of Physics to press the British Standards Institution for a revision of the physics section of the Universal Decimal Classification, at present used in many libraries? The classification is grand in conception, with the whole of knowledge divided into ten categories (five being pure science), each category then being subdivided into ten more (53 = physics), and so on ad infinitum; but it is no more suitable for physics than that other decimal device, the abacus.

The skills of the technical staff working in university physics departments are valued highly by the academic staff and are essential to both teaching and research. However, concern is currently being expressed that technical staff are not being rewarded adequately for these skills, and this could affect the well-being and future of some physics departments.

In the August issue of Physics Bulletin (Late news) we reported on the mysterious disappearance of five Argentinian physicists: Frederico Alvarez Rojas, Gabriela Carabelli, Juan Carlos Gallardo, Antonio Misetich and Eduardo Pasquini. The plight of another Argentinian physicist has now been brought to public attention by Amnesty International (see Nature 11 August 1977).

It is too soon to judge the effect, if any, that the Prime Minister's initiative and the consequent green paper will have on science education. There can be little doubt, however, that the period of discussion and debate which preceded the publication of the document has been of importance to science educators.

Under China's new leadership, scientific research and international scientific and technical exchanges are about to be given greater emphasis. Hua Kuo-feng, who succeeded to the positions of both Chairman Mao Tse-tung and Premier Chou En-lai, is promising increased support for basic research and for higher education.

The Institute of Physics celebrated the 50th anniversary of the discovery of electron diffraction by holding a conference in London in September to mark the occasion. There was an exhibition of photographs of historical and current interest at the conference and we reproduce on pages 468 and 469 a selection of these photographs.

At a time when publication and distribution costs are continually rising the Council of The Institute of Physics has approved subscription rates for Institute journals in 1978 which reflect the very real effort of the Institute to keep prices down. For example the library rates for Physics Bulletin, Physics in Technology and Journal of Physics G: Nuclear Physics remain unchanged.

Professor R G Chambers takes over the duties of Vice-President for Publications of The Institute of Physics this month from Dr R S Pease. R G Chambers took his first degree at Cambridge in 1944 and then spent two years in the Scientific Civil Service, working on tank gunnery problems, and a year at the Electrical Research Association before returning to Cambridge in 1947 and taking his PhD in 1952.

1977 has been a busy year for the National Radiological Protection Board. Founded in 1970 with the statutory duty of researching, teaching and advising on all matters concerning radiological usage, hazard and protection, the work is now rationalised around three centres.

The electronics industry in South Korea has recently been the subject of considerable attention from western European governments, due to the proposed import from South Korea of large numbers of portable television sets at prices which were extremely competitive with those of local manufacturers. Within the thriving economy of South Korea, which is centrally planned and directed, the electronics industry has made remarkable progress.

In the foreword to the Culham Laboratory annual report for 1976, Dr R S Pease, Director of the Laboratory, comments that the Joint European Torus project is overdue and is now suffering from serious lack of decision on vital matters: an agreed management system, a project leader and a site. Much effort has been spent working on these points, he says, but at the time of writing agreement between Euratom countries on these matters has not been reached.

The impetus for much current work in the fields of plasma surface interactions, sputtering, blistering and surface atomic arrangement stems from the nuclear fusion programme, which in Britain centres around the DITE tokamak reactor at the Culham Laboratory. Here, despite sophisticated electromagnetic plasma confinement, the containing vessel surfaces are subjected to considerable ion bombardment.

As with laser beams, electron beams are being used in an attempt to achieve thermonuclear fusion. A group from the Kurchatov Institute in Moscow led by L I Rudakov has been using a target of deuterium gas in a conical cavity (apex angle 60°) held in a lead block.

The idea of using magnetic levitation to provide high-speed inner- or inter-city transport is not new; it was first proposed theoretically in the early 1900s and the idea of using superconducting magnets on the train and an aluminium track was proposed in 1966. There are several methods of obtaining magnetic levitation and the various systems being tested in America, Europe and Japan have used the first three methods listed in table 1, with their attendant advantages and disadvantages.

Detonative combustion occurs only under certain restricted conditions. Definition of these conditions, however, requires a close understanding of the interaction between strongly exothermic reaction and gas dynamics.

The regulations regarding the safety of equipment at sea are very stringent. Within the next two years ship operators will be faced with a whole new set of rules concerning pollution.

The report of a laser generating an average power of 0.36 W at a wavelength of 3.417 μm (Phys. Rev. Lett. 1977 38 892) would not be a matter for comment in the normal run of events. That the laser is tunable appears mildly more interesting, although this is by no means the first tunable system.

The dating of glass and glassware involves a widely used yet ill-defined method – the application of expertise. The bringing together of an expert's knowledge and experience gained over many years about colour, weight, shape, etc, provides him with a 'feeling', which often amounts to a 'certainty' about what a piece of glass is and when, even where, it was made.

Interstellar dust is a topic which crops up quite often in astronomy and is the subject of much research. It is interesting to see that research originally done for astronomical purposes — the development of solar cells for powering satellites – is to be applied to dust rather nearer home.

Deconvolution, the process of separating the signal from the aberrations of the equipment, ought to be taught to all physicists, but it is usually ignored. In this article the similarities of several apparently different methods are revealed by Fourier analysis and the pitfalls strongly emphasised

Readers of Physics Bulletin might be forgiven for supposing that the Ampere Group is devoted to the precise determination of the unit of electrical current. It is, however, a European association of physicists dedicated to research in the field of radiospectroscopy.

The European Physical Society is a unique, international organisation for the promotion by all suitable means of the advancement of physics throughout Europe and its neighbouring countries. In it physicists from 26 countries ranging from Ireland in the west to the Soviet Union in the east and from Norway in the north to Israel in the south combine together without government sponsorship to organise the affairs of the society in a democratic way.

Harold Jeffreys and Bertha Swirles (eds) London: Gordon and Breach 1977 pp xviii + 622 price £35.30

The publication of this volume completes the beautifully produced and edited six volumes of collected papers of Sir Harold Jeffreys. Much of the editorial work has been done by Lady Jeffreys: happily Sir Harold is upsetting this plan by continuing his unique contribution to geophysics in scientific journals.

J R Nielsen (ed) Amsterdam: North-Holland 1977 pp ix + 765 price $120.50

Volume 4 of the collected works of Niels Bohr (a fundamental contribution to the History of Science in the XXth century, started by the late Léon Rosenfeld in collaboration with J Rud Nielsen, editor of the present volume) contains the papers, lectures and correspondence of the 1920–1923 period and the Encyclopaedia Britannica article of 1926, all concerned with the problem of atomic structure and the periodic table. It is a fascinating series of documents which describe the various attempts to achieve a consistent picture of the electronic constitution of the elements.

John Gribbin London: Macmillan 1976 pp viii + 79 price £5.95 (cased), £2.95 (paperback)

The aim of Galaxy Formation is to present the main models proposed for the formation of galaxies at a level suitable for second-year university physics students. The author discusses Jeans' gravitational instability, gravitational clustering, the Ambartsumian fragmentation hypothesis, and the retarded-core hypothesis, and quite rightly attempts to place these ideas in the cosmological context by sketching briefly both steady state and hot big bang models.

J T Houghton London: Cambridge University Press 1977 pp xiii + 203 price £6.50

This book is an attempt to bring to the attention of undergraduate and postgraduate students the physical processes governing the structure and circulation of planetary atmospheres. The book will be of more value to students of the earth's atmosphere than to those interested in other planets as the latter receive little attention.

Arthur Beer and Peter Beer (eds) Oxford: Pergamon 1977 pp ii + 412 price £35

This volume of the excellent series Vistas in Astronomy contains a 75th birthday greeting to Dr Arthur Beer, editor of the whole series and responsible for the very high standard that it has maintained. The book is of the usual quality, a pleasure to handle; but of course such quality carries the penalty of some delay – there are few references later than 1974 – and also of a high price.

A W Joshi New Delhi: Wiley Eastern 1977 (distrib. by J Wiley, Chichester) pp xiii + 324 price £2.95

Group theory has played an important role in our understanding of modern physics and this book is a useful introductory text for postgraduate students. The first three chapters describe basic group theory, Hilbert spaces and operators, and representation theory for finite groups.

Alan Vincent Chichester: J Wiley 1977 pp 156 price £5.90

This little book could be more helpful than most in solving the problem of introducing postgraduate experimentalists to group theory when their research demands some knowledge of it. Designed for chemists, it starts with symmetry operations and elements, continues with irreducible and reducible representations and matrices, and concludes with applications to bonding and molecular vibrations.

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

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

Late-breaking conference news, calls for papers and general news.