(1) Atoms and Electrons (2) The Atom and the Bohr Theory of its Structure: an Elementary Presentation

Abstract

SCIENCE is steadily becoming severely specialised. The proportion of amateurs (in the restricted sense of the word) among original workers of all ranks decreases slowly but surely. The average “educated “man ofjto-day knows less and cares less about the natural world in which he lives than did the average “educated “man of the Victorian era. A scientific event, such as an eclipse of the sun, which in the ‘seventies claimed day after day several columns of newspaper space, is now dismissed in a few short paragraphs. When, as occasionally happens, science emerges for a brief interval above the welter of political and commercial intrigue, it is by virtue either of some achievement which may be used for practical ends, such as wireless telephony, or of some sensational development, like the theory of relativity, which provides entertainment and a passing relief from the stress of more attractive matters. The keen, active interest of the amateur in science for its own sake, though happily still conspicuous in some quarters, is unmistakably on the wane.

(1) Atoms and Electrons.

By J. W. N. Sullivan. (People's Library.) Pp. 188. (London and Toronto: Hodder and Stoughton, Ltd., 1923.) 2s. 6d. net.

(2) The Atom and the Bohr Theory of its Structure: an Elementary Presentation.

By H. A. Kramers Helge Holst. Translated from the Danish by R. B. Lindsay and Rachel T. Lindsay. Pp. xiii + 210. (London, Copenhagen and Christiania: Gyldendal, 1923.) 10s. 6d. net.