The Ultracentrifuge

Abstract

PROF. SVEDBERG'S institute at Uppsala has been for some years now a world-famous international club, with notices in several languages which may or may not include Swedish. The book just published summarizes the work of the staff and visitors with the ultracentrifuges during fifteen years of steady progress. It is significant of its international character that the authors consist of three Swedes, one Dane, four Americans, one Scotsman, and a Swiss. Of the two chief authors, Prof. Svedberg confines himself mainly to the constructional part, showing clearly how, “given the height and thickness of the column of solution and its distance from the centre of rotation, all other mechanical characteristics of the ultracentrifuge can be directly derived”. The other main author, Dr. Pedersen, expounds, with the same unflagging patience with which he helped to develop, all the minute points of detail which must be observed before the apparently simple results can be obtained. The section on results, also largely by Dr. Pedersen, is fairly short, which is right, since these are all in the literature and a full bibliography is given, whereas much of the technical part is published here for the first time. The greatest interest of all, perhaps, is contained in the section on rotor design, where the succession of hopes, disappointments, and triumphs reads like a novel. Visitors have always heard of mysterious conferences with a “steam turbine expert from Stockholm” when a new rotor was in contemplation. The mystery man now seems to be revealed as G. Boestad. One wonders whether he is the artist responsible for the quite unearthly beauty of the modern rotor (see Fig. 97).

The Ultracentrifuge

By The Svedberg and Kai O. Pedersen, in cooperation with J. H. Bauer and E. P. Pickels; G. Boestad; E. 0. Kraemer and J. B. Nichols; O. Lamm; A. S. McFarlane; R. Signer. (International Series of Monographs on Physics.) Pp. x + 478 + 31 plates. (Oxford: Clarendon Press; London: Oxford University Press, 1940.) 40s. net.