This is an unusual book. The late Prof. Debye gave his second set of Baker Lectures at CoriielI in the Spring of 1961. The date is not given in this book where they are described only as " recently delivered ". Prof. Chu has used these lectures as the basis for a short book which falls into two quite different parts.Chap. 1-5, which occupy the first 80 pages, are an elementary and often ingenious account of intermolecular forces. The fifth introduces the relativistic retardation effect and describes the measurement of the forces between macroscopic objects. The mathematics is simple; the functions sinh and cosh are defined and even the expansion of exp x is explained in a footnote.Chap. 6, which occupies the second half of the book, differs from the first five, both in subject and standard. It opens with a condensed account of Maxwell's equations of electromagnetism and proceeds to a discussion of the scattering of radiation, first by single particles and by non-propagating fluctuations (Rayleigh), then by dense fluids in which the pressure fluctuations can be represented by an array of sound waves (Brillouin), and finally by critical systems in which the correlation length of the fluctuations is comparable with the wave-length of the light. These are the subjects on which Chu worked with Debye and this chapter is more up-to-date than the first five. Interest in these subjects is increasing rapidly and so reviews are now valuable, although a shilling a page would be a high price to pay for this chapter alone.
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