BOOK REVIEW

Atom Physics, MAX BORN: 6th ed. Blackie, 445 pp., 40s.

THE very fact that a sixth edition of this well-known book has been prepared says more for its value than anything that could be written. The first edition originalIy appeared in German in 1933 and an English translation followed in 1935. Since that time four further editions and many reprints have been prepared prior to this sixth edition.

This is undoubtedly a most valuable text-book, well known and well used by students and research workers, for it deals with those fundamental concepts of atomic structure that are common to many of the present-day specialized fields of physics.

The approach is basically theoretical and startsin the early ninteenth century at the very beginning of atomic theory and deals with kinetic theory, the discovery of the elementary particles leading to the Rutherford atom and the Bohr atom, with full accounts of the energy levels of electrons in a Coulomb field, and the detailed refinements of theory that enable one to explain the complex terms in optical spectra. Molecular binding and molecular spectra are discussed and the properties of bulk matter dealt with in terms of the statistical distributions of elementary particles. The basic features of wave mechanics and matrix mechanics as a formal treatment of atomic systems are described and the relations of these theories to the more classical models are emphasized.

Most of the book deals with extra-nuclear properties, but there are two chapters which deal exclusively with nuclear phenomena. The book was originally written when very little was known about the nucleus, so that to make extensive additions to the textwould alter the whole nature of the volume. However, it is somewhat disappointing to find that some of the expansions of the original text are so brief. In particular, one feels that more space should be given to the shell and collective models of the nucleus, especially as the shell structure of the atom and the periodic table are dealt with so fully and so clearly.

Nowhere has the Appendix been used so extensively to keep detailed sections away from the main text. Ideas are presented and the reader is referred to the appendix for further discussion and related topics. In fact, almost one-third of the book consists of appendices and the book gains enormously from this treatment.

This book will prove of great value to all those who would learn of those basic theories and their subsequent development that give us our knowledge of the complicated structure of those “in- destructible” particles-atoms.

J. F. R.

ERRATUM

CARREA, WEST and BALL (1958) J. Nucl. Energy 7, 189-198. Line 1, p. 191. For 0.03, read O-06.

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