The Electron Theory of Matter.

Descripción

First Edition. vi, 1 leaf, 612 pp; ads (4 pp); 58 figs. Original cloth. Front joint a bit worn in a few very small spots. Corners of covers slightly worn. Signature of former owner (Sylvester Whitten, a minor computer scientist of the 1950s) on front flyleaf. Pencil notes on verso of rear flyleaf and rear pastedown. Else Very Good. Cambridge Physical Series. Owen Willans Richardson: Nobel Prize, Physics, 1928, 'for his work on the thermionic phenomenon and especially for the discovery of the law named after him.' '[H]is first book . . . developed from lectures given to graduate students at Princeton, among whom were Robert H. Goddard and the brothers Arthur H. and Karl T. Compton. This book became a classic text for a generation of students interested in radio and electronics' (Loyd S. Swenson, Jr. in D.S.B. XI: 420). 'It is impossible to distinguish between these two equations by experimenting. The effect of the T2 or T½ term is so small compared with the exponential factor that a small change in A and w will entirely conceal it. In fact, at my instigation K. K. Smith in 1915 measured the emission from tungsten over such a wide range of temperature that the current changed by a factor of nearly 1012, yet the results seemed to be equally well covered by either (1) or (2) [unfortunately I cannot write these equations here]. It is, of course, very satisfactory to know that either formula will do this. There are not many physical laws which have been tested over so wide a range. The great advantage of Eq. (2) is that it makes A a universal constant; so that there is only one specific constant for each substance, amely w. The first time I mentioned explicitly that A was a universal constant was in 1915. Here I came to it as a result of a thermodynamic argument about electron emission. In 1914 [in the book offered here] I had already come to it by a different route. I had come to the conclusion that the classical statistics were not applicable to the electrons inside conductors. There was no means of ascertaining what the correct statistics were, so I endeavoured to avoid this difficulty by adopting some quantum ideas previously used by Keesom to calculate the specific heat of helium at low temperatures. In this way I determined the constant A as 0.547 mk2e/h3 (m and e being the mass and charge of the electron, k and h Boltzmann and Planck's constants). These calculations have since been improved upon by others, but there still seems to be some doubt about the pure number factor which I made out to be 0.547. The most probable value of it seems to be 4 p. Amongst those whose writings have made important contributions to this question since 1915 are von Laue (1918), Tolman (1921), Dushman (1923), Roy (1926), Sommerfeld (1927), and R. H. Fowler (1928)' (Richardson in his Nobel Lecture, 'Thermionic phenomena and the laws which govern them', December 12, 1929). N° de ref. del artículo 17379

Contactar al vendedor

Denunciar este artículo

Detalles bibliográficos