Mr. Tompkins Explores the Atom Electrons in Action Science in Progress

Abstract

IF one may judge by the appearance of the bookshop windows and the bookstalls there is, at the moment, quite a minor boom in popular science in the publishing world. The part played by science in the Second World War and the publicity given to it in the Press have made science 'news' to an unprecedented degree, and authors and publishers seem to have guessed that the man in the street will want to know more about it. As might have been expected, in the circumstances, some of the resulting volumes bear every mark of having been hurriedly put together to catch the market-ephemera, for which no long-continued existence can be prophesied. In the meantime, the output of more authoritative and serious works has not slackened ; three of these form the subject of this review. Science, we all know, is, or at any rate used to be, international ; but a British reviewer may be pardoned a little quite friendly envy that all three books should have been written in the United States, and two of them published there. One would wish, out of sheer gratitude if for no other reason, that more could be done to put this form of 'lease-lend' into reverse.

Mr. Tompkins Explores the Atom

G. Gamow. Pp. x + 97. (London: Cambridge University Press, 1945.) 10s. 6d. net.

Electrons in Action

James Stokley. (Whittlesey House Publication.) Pp. xi + 320 + 37 plates. (New York and London: McGraw-Hill Book Co. Inc., 1946.) 18s.

Science in Progress

Walter R. Miles Selig Hecht George D. Birkhoff Henry Eyring K. C. D. Hickman Edwin J. Cohn Detlev W. Bronk Otto Loewi Peter Debye Isidore I. Rabi C. A. Elvehjem. George A. Baitsell. Fourth Series (Society of the Sigma Xi, National Lectureships 1943 and 1944). Pp. xvi + 331. (London: Oxford University Press, 1945.) 20s.