A Survey of Physics: a Collection of Lectures and Essays

Abstract

MESSRS. Methuen are doing a real service to science by their publication of translations of foreign scientific works, but they are not always fortunate in their choice of books for translation. It might have been thought in a book with so attractive a title and by such an eminent scientific worker they had a real certainty. The book itself, however, somewhat disappointed our, perhaps unduly great, expectations. It is a collection of lectures and addresses, delivered on different occasions and at different times, mainly on the thesis that physics has now reached the stage when the attempt to form a mechanical picture of natural processes, which has engrossed the attention of the great physicists of the past, should be definitely abandoned, and we should satisfy our souls with the subtleties of thermodynamics and the search for an all-embracing formula. The author develops his thesis forcibly and ingeniously though, necessarily from the structure of the book, with some repetition, and the book should prove attractive to those interested in the philosophy of science. To the physicist the most interesting chapter is that in which the author sketches the road by which he arrived at the quantum theory. The translators have not always been happy in their rendering of the original. We, at least, had some little difficulty in recognising in “Thales von Milet” our old friend Thales of Miletus.