Abstract
A SERIES of articles in the Morning Post, of which the author is scientific correspondent, formed the idea for this book. It “was to be popular yet accurate; stimulating to the layman yet not without value to the scientist; emphasising the unknown, yet providing, incidentally, a reliable picture of what was already known”. The author, while not expecting to reach this ideal, has in many places closely approached it. The style is distinctly journalistic; for example, Cockcroft and Walton are referred to as “the original large scale atom-splitters”. A few of the statements are rather wild and might be a little misleading to the layman for whom the book is primarily intended; on p. 6, for example, we read, “Plasticene?was at one stage of very real importance in the exploration of the atom”, surely a pointless statement since the same might be said of many other materials commonly employed in the apparatus. Then again, on p. 284, “The physicist has a long way to go yet before he will have satisfied his colleague the engineer that he knows what he is talking about,” which is scarcely a happy way of expressing what ‘the author evidently has in mind. Except for these occasional lapses, the book is enjoyable and worth reading, covering as it does the whole field of science in a representative way.
Unsolved Problems of Science
A. W.
Haslett
By. Pp. xi + 317. (London: G. Bell and Sons, Ltd., 1935.) 7s. 6d. net
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L., H. Unsolved Problems of Science. Nature 137, 50 (1936). https://doi.org/10.1038/137050c0
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/137050c0