Atomic Theory and the, Description of Nature 1: Four Essays, with an Introductory Survey

Abstract

IT is fitting that the year in which the Bohr theory comes of age should hear a pronouncement by its author on the view of Nature to which it has led. It is true that in one sense the pronouncement is not up to date (the book is a reprint of previously published articles, the latest of which first appeared in 1929), but the scant amount of fundamental progress in the last few years, combined with Bohr's remarkable power of always seeing a little ahead of the existing position, makes this of small significance. The most striking of the subsequent advances have been the discoveries of the neutron and the positive ‘electron’, and in the other volume “containing a number of later essays on the same subject, in which the general point of view is further developed”, which we are promised in the foreword, we may hope to find some account of the theoretical aspect of these discoveries. In the meantime, however, the present volume may be taken as a true representation of the view of Nature afforded by the quantum theory to one of the keenest pairs of eyes in the world of physics.

Atomic Theory and the, Description of Nature. 1: Four Essays, with an Introductory Survey.

By Niels Bohr. Pp. vi + 119. (Cambridge: At the University Press, 1934.) 6s. net.