Licht und Farbe in Kolloiden: eine phänomenologische Monographie

Abstract

THE large volume before us is the first part of a work designed to deal exclusively and exhaustively with the optical properties of disperse systems. Readers familiar with the existing text-books of colloid chemistry, in which a score of pages, or less, is devoted to these properties, will be struck with the large amount of information which the author has made readily accessible. The method of presentation he has chosen is, we are told, the “phenomenological” an adjective which the author feels obliged to explain even to the German reader; he does so in the following terms: “The author sees the characteristic of this method of presentation in the attention paid to all phenomena, and not only to selected ones, which fit a particular theory. A second characteristic consists in the attempt to separate concepts and to arrange phenomena in orderly fashion as neatly as possible.” It will be generally agreed that these are desiderata in all scientific writing, but the author develops an antithesis between phenomenological and mathematical treatment which will scarcely command such general assent. Fortunately, the important question whether quantitative relations can be discovered, or be proved to hold generally, by methods other than mathematical, need not be debated here, as the vast majority of the phenomena treated in the work under review are much too complicated for mathematical treatment at present. Even where such treatment has been carried out, with all the apparatus of modern mathematical physics, as in the case of gold sols, the results are only in moderate agreement with experimental measurements.

Licht und Farbe in Kolloiden: eine phänomenologische Monographie.

Von Prof. Dr. Wolfgang Ostwald. Erster Teil: Optische Heterogenität, Polarisation, Drehung, allgemeine Absorption, Heterogenitätsfarben, Brechung. (Die Ergebnisse bis 1914.) (Handbuch der Kolloidwissenschaft in Einzeldarstellungen, Band 1.) Pp. xiv + 556 + 17 Tafeln. (Dresden und Leipzig: Theodor Steinkopff, 1924.) 7.60 dollars.