Reviews and abstracts

Abstract

In their preface the authors say, “Nuclear physics is by no means a finished edifice. It is very much to be hoped that the fundamental laws can be discovered which will account for all the known properties of nuclei and will allow us to predict new, unknown properties successfully. At present we must restrict ourselves to the investigation and correlation of all known nuclear properties on a semi‐empirical basis. This book is devoted in its entirety to this task.”This task is indeed an enormous one, which hardly any other authors have ever attempted to achieve in a textbook, mainly because of the rapidly accumulating experimental facts that demand interpretation. Although Blatt and Weisskopf state that they had to omit many details and special developments, this relatively small volume covers almost all the aspects of theoretical nuclear physics and critically distinguishes between well‐established fundamentals and more speculative aspects.