Abstract
THE rapid advances now being made in our knowledge of the physical properties of matter have made it desirable that progress reports should be published at frequent intervals; three such reports have been issued by the Physical Society, and a number have appeared from time to time in the issues of the Physikalische Zeitschrift, the latest being on nuclear physics by Profs. S. Flugge and A. Krebs, which occupies twenty-four pages of the issue of January 1. The Physics Forum in the issue of the Review of Scientific Instruments of January occupies twelve pages devoted entirely to a review of some of the most noteworthy advances, by Prof. T. H. Osgood of the University of Toledo, Ohio. It deals with the collisions of slow and fast neutrons with atomic nuclei and the knowledge of the effective cross-sections of nuclei which has been derived from them; with the scattering of one type of nuclear particle by another and the applicability of gravitational and electrical inverse square laws of action of one particle on another; the changes of mass when atoms are built up of their constituent parts; the recent removal of doubts as to the validity of the momentum explanation of the Compton effect; the frequent transformations from matter to radiation and back again which take place in the path of a cosmic ray, which make complete investigation difficult; the discovery that the oscillations of the atoms in a crystal lattice are not isotropic and the question whether supraconductivity in metals, which is suppressed instantly by a magnetic field and more slowly by a rise of temperature, is due to a surface or a volume effect. Prof. Osgood also touches on the increased accuracy of newspaper articles on scientific subjects and on “the growing recognition of the importance of physics and the training which physics gives in industrial fields”. His report will be much appreciated by readers who have not the time to devote to more detailed accounts.
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Physics in 1936. Nature 139, 501 (1937). https://doi.org/10.1038/139501a0
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/139501a0