Table of contents

The Journal of Geophysical Research (Space Physics) has for ten years used a system of referee acknowledgment which may be of interest to those concerned with the relationship between authors, referees and editors. This takes the form: 'The Editor wishes to thank Dr A, Dr B and another referee for their assistance in evaluating this paper'.

Recent correspondence has called for the Institute to play a more active role in matters affecting pay scales, career structure and mobility of members. Nowhere is this more urgent than in physics education, particularly in schools and especially in the maintained sector, where the situation is rapidly becoming desperate.

I am writing to protest about the cuts to Physics Bulletin. I am an Associate Member of The Institute of Physics because I desire to keep in touch with events in physics, but the only obvious return for my subscription is Physics Bulletin.

Is any one exercised about the si unit of dynamic viscosity, 1 Pa s? The pascal is a unit of pressure, the force being perpendicular to the surface, but in the definition of viscosity the force is parallel to the surface.

The Finniston Report of the Committee of Enquiry into the engineering profession is concerned with the national economic needs and the requirements of manufacturing industry. As necessary, but not sufficient, actions to bring about real improvements in industrial performance it recommends major changes in the education and training of engineers, as well as a new system for the registration and licensing of engineers.

There's a very fine Academy of Sciences in Russia. Why don't they do something about it?

For some time now it has been clear that The Institute of Physics faces financial difficulties, stemming from a decline in membership during a period of rising costs. Younger physicists especially, it seems, no longer feel that the Institute deserves their annual subscription.

Final figures are now available for the numbers of university applications received during the period 1978–9 (for courses commencing in October 1979). The Seventeenth Report of the Universities' Central Council on Admissions published recently shows some interesting results.

Some of the problems that beset today's would-be conference organisers were highlighted at a meeting of Institute of Physics members held during the Solid State Physics conference at Warwick University at the beginning of the year. Professor A J Forty (Chairman of the Solid State Physics Subcommittee) opened a discussion on the solid state physics conference itself, by commenting on the good attendance, in spite of greatly increased fees.

On 1 October 1880 J H Poynting became the first professor of physics at Mason College, subsequently the University of Birmingham. The Department of Physics intends to mark this centenary with a celebration on 20 and 21 September 1980.

1986 could see the initial operation of Europe's Large Electron–Positron collider (LEP), according to the latest announcement from CERN. If all its member states are in favour, the decision to build LEP could be made within the year.

Eight scientists received a total of £61 000 in prize money at a ceremony held at the Royal Society on 4 Mafch 1980. The award was made by the Rank Prize Funds for 'outstanding contributions to the science of optoelectronics', one of the two fields which particularly interested the late Lord Rank who set up the Funds shortly before his death in 1972.

Fortunately for researchers, damage was mainly confined to buildings and support facilities when an earthquake struck the Lawrence Livermore Laboratory, USA on 24 January 1980. The two lasers, ARGUS and SHIVA, sustained minor damage, whilst repairs to their support equipment (electrical, mechanical, repositioning of the laser and target frames) will cost $126 000.

Victor F Weisskopf of MIT, who was recently made an Honorary Fellow of The Institute of Physics (Physics Bulletin April 1980 p92), has an alternative explanation for the formation of Cooper pairs (1979 CERN Report 79–12 The formation of Cooper pairs and the nature of superconducting currents'). Although fundamentally identical to the calculations of the emission and absorption of sound waves which form the basis of the Bardeen, Cooper and Schrieffer model the new picture is intuitively more attractive.

Superfluid helium films show both two and three-dimensional properties, requiring explanation from the theorists. This problem formed the basis of Professor J Reppy's evening lecture to the department of physics at Bristol University in February.

No more will the requirement to know the temperature field within a medium necessitate the use of arrays of thermocouples, the very presence of which contrive to cloud the picture. A technique which is noninterfering, instantaneous and continuous over a multidimensional field has been developed at the UKAEA Culham Laboratory – a 'laser holography technique for temperature sensing'.

Two Birmingham physicists, T D Beynon and A G Pink, have demonstrated that zone plate encoded neutron holography can be used to image objects (Nature 1980 283 749). This is an extension of the suggestion by L Mertz in 1961 that zone plate shadow casting could be used to image extragalactic x-ray sources, an idea that was taken up in nuclear medicine for focusing the radiation (x-rays and γ-rays) from radioactive organs.

It was back in 1966 that W D Myers and W J Swiatecki pointed out that the effect of proton and neutron shell closures on the balance between the attractive interneutron force and the repulsive electrostatic force between protons could be strong enough to give stability to certain 'superheavy' elements. Subsequent theoretical work predicted an 'island' of such elements situated (on a plot of atomic number versus neutron number) off the end of the 'peninsula' of known elements, being separated from it by the 'sea' of instability.

Enterprise is essential to seeing our way across 'the final frontier'. However, nature and modern technology do provide inspiration, as can be seen from two recent proposals for telescope design.

Interpretation of data obtained with less than ideal sensitivity is a universal problem, particularly to astronomers. Most confidence can be placed in measurements of nearby objects, but are the results truly representative of the whole universe?

A team at the laboratory of chemical evolution in the University of Maryland has discovered amino acids – in meteorites found in the Antarctic. Lying buried in the ice, the meteorites could not have picked up any organic material from the earth and the samples have been collected in extremely clean conditions, using a technique first applied on the moon.

Materials that are light, highly compressible and 'soft as soap' and yet conduct electricity are well worth seeking. Some success has been achieved with the so-called 'expanded metals' in which ammonia molecules are allowed to cluster round the itinerant electrons, thereby holding the metallic atoms apart.

For years mathematicians and computer scientists have pondered on the question of an efficient method of solution for all linear programming problems. Moving from vertex to vertex in multidimensional space on a surface defined by the many constraints is tedious, but it always appeared possible to invent a problem that would foil any short cut.

Ideally, the needle playing a record should exactly follow the track of the stylus that cut the original track. The latter moved along a radius, but most pickup arms pivot about a fixed point, the needle takes a curved path and the quality of sound is thus impaired.

In this article, one in the series in Physics Bulletin covering Institute affairs, the Vice-President with responsibility for Membership reviews the activities and work of the Membership Department, which is under the direct guidance of the Registrar

The data below have been obtained from a preliminary examination of the computer printout for the latest in the Institute's series of triennial remuneration surveys. Members were asked to provide details of their rate of annual salary from their main occupation on 1 January 1980 together with any income received during 1979 from related secondary occupations.

The year was dominated by the necessity for recruitment in order to maintain the financial stability of the Institute at a time when the inflation of our costs exceeded the rise in our income. The staff at headquarters was reduced from 54 to 41, resulting in less service to members in the organisation of meetings, conferences and exhibitions.

Darwin's book, On the Origin of Species, was published in 1859. It is perhaps the most influential book that has ever been published, because it was read by scientist and nonscientist alike, and it aroused violent controversy.

S W Hawking and W Israel (eds) 1979 Cambridge: Cambridge University Press xviii + 919 pp price £37

The stream of books which have appeared to commemorate the Einstein centenary can leave no doubt as to the awe in which his contributions to modern physical thought are still held. It is a nice touch that the preface to this volume should contain a facsimile of the letter from Clerk Maxwell, who died one hundred years ago (an event which appears to have gone almost unnoticed), concerning the possibility that anomalies in the motion of the Jovian moons might be used to detect motion through the aether: a letter which was to catch the eye of one Albert Michelson and change the course of physics so dramatically.

Hiroyuki Tadokoro 1979 Chichester: John Wiley xviii + 465 pp price £21.35

By deliberately limiting the scope of his book Professor Tadokoro has produced a very thorough text which gives the basic theory and experimental methods of wide angle x-ray diffraction, infrared and Raman spectroscopy, and mathematical modelling by energy calculations for determining the configuration and conformation of polymer molecules in their crystal lattice.

H Fiedler (ed) 1978 Berlin: Springer vol I: xx + 295 pp price $14.80; vol II: xx + 406 pp price $17.80 (paperback)

These two well edited volumes present a rich picture of current activity. Four invited surveys on 'large scale structures in turbulence', 'turbulent transport', 'noise' and 'problems in turbulence theory' frame some 57 contributions, giving much experimental detail and some elegant photographs.

Rolf G Winter 1979 Belmont, California: Wadsworth xi + 403 pp price £12.75

This book is based on a US course, but could serve well as a text for an undergraduate course in the UK. It contains little on the historical background to the quantum theory, assuming that students have learnt this in an earlier course or related reading, but it develops the nonrelativistic theory from Schrödinger's equation to scattering theory, and deals with transition probabilities in some detail.

Cleanthes A Nicolaides and Donald R Beck (eds) 1978 Dordrecht, Holland: D Reidel x + 576 pp price $59

It is not the intention of this reviewer to give a separate critical appraisal of each article in this specialised volume, other than to state that some of the contributions are better than most and none are poor. However, I was disappointed on first reading the volume since, as I soon realised, I had been misled over the content of the book by the title.

D F Brewer (ed) 1979 Amsterdam: North-Holland Vila : xii + 394 pp price $60; Vllb: xii + 400 pp price $60 (two-volume set $106)

Earlier volumes in this series were published between 1957 and 1970 under the editorship of C J Gorter, and they contained many stimulating and memorable articles. The series has been revived under Douglas Brewer, and this first pair of volumes maintains the high standard.

Charles M Vest 1979 Chichester: John Wiley xiii + 465 pp price £19.50

A stated aim of this book is 'to provide a unified, selfcontained treatment of the theory, practice and application of holographic interferometry and related coherent optical measurement techniques'. This aim has been achieved in a well balanced and well presented manner.

L Ley and M Cardona (eds) 1979 Berlin: Springer xviii + 402 pp price $53.90

This second volume of the twovolume set on photoemission in solids adopts the technique of using a series of discussions of recent experimental data as a framework for illustrating the more general theoretical principles with which the first volume is primarily concerned. Apart from presenting informative accounts of the basic principles of photoemission, the various case studies cover a wide range of materials and properties, and as a result this book forms a useful reference on many aspects of solid state and surface physics as well as photoemission.

Christopher Evans 1979 London: Victor Gollancz 255 pp price £5.50

A book which has achieved bestseller status and formed the basis of a television documentary series scarcely needs further publicity. But what does need to be said is that the late Christopher Evans has produced an excellent nontechnical account of the origins and potential future developments of the microchip revolution that deserves – on account of the importance of the subject matter, as well as the readable character of the text – the serious consideration that can only come from careful reading (and re-reading).

Jayant V Narlikar 1979 London: Macmillan viii + 279 pp price £9.95

Based on lectures by the author, this book is a mostly standard introduction to 'classical' general relativity. I liked it because it moves along rapidly and, generally, says the right thing at the right time to help the reader.

M M Woolfson (ed) 1979 Bristol: Adam Hilger xi + 592 pp price £30

On the occasion of the 4th general conference of the EPS held in York in September 1978 a number of plenary and invited papers was given to the delegates. The present volume presents these papers to a wider audience and must be welcomed for that reason.

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.