JF Ptak Science Books Post 2458
It really is a rare thing to open a book and find it full of significant contributions by numerous people occurring in situ as it were–not an intentional collection of greats, but a “serendipitous one. In this case the find occurred in one bound volume of the American Physical Society’s Review of Modern Physics–a single volume containing two years of papers for 1945 and 1946. I’ve seen this a number of times–as with bound volumes for The Physical Review for 1932, and 1939 and 1948, for example–and it is always a pleasure to watch the great epic of those years roll out as you leaf your way through the volume.
And so it happens with volume 17 and 18 of the Reviews1, the greatest interest in this volume is no doubt the multiple blockbuster of contributors for the commemoration of Niels Bohr’s birthday, in Volume 17/2, April-July 1945, pp 97-350, “In Commemoration of the Sixtieth Birthday of Niels Bohr, October Seventh, 1945”. The field is full of the major names (and Nobel Prize recipients) of physics in the 20th century. These include Bloch, Born, Chandrasekhar, Dirac, Einstein, Feynman, Gamow, Goudsmit, Heitler, Hevesy, London, Meitner, Pauli, Rabi, Van Vleck, Weisskopf, Wheeler, and others, a full-ish list of the papers is included below. (The Wheeler-Feynman paper is significant on its own and highly cited.)
- This volume is available for purchase at the blog’s bookstore, here.