ATOMS AND STARS

New Zealand Listener, Volume 37, Issue 938, 2 August 1957, Page 18

ATOMS AND STARS

THE ATOM, 5th Edition, by Sir George Thomson (Home University Library); Oxford University Press, English price 7/6. THE MODERN UNIVERSE, by Raymond A. ‘Lyttleton; Hodder and Stoughton, English price 16/-. : "HESE are not easy books to read, but they are rewarding, even if, as with this reviewer, one’s knowledge of ‘nuclear science is inadequate. The old simplicity of electron and proton, which held when Thomson’s book was first published in 1930, has gone. Instead we have "this great complexity of entities that obviously represent something deep-seated in the nature of the physical world, but do not seem to help us much to explain it." To turn from Thomson to Lyttleton is to turn from contemplating things infinitely smallmost atoms have a diameter of about one hundred-millionth of an inch-to considering dimensions infinitely largeour own galaxy ‘measures about six hundred thousand billion miles in diameter. Yet the subjects of the two books have much in common, apart from the idea advanced by Jeans many years ago- | "The story of the atom is written across the sky." Both lead into the real of | philosophy. "From the philosophical point of view," says Thomson, "the most important feature of the quantum mechanics is its strong trend away from determinism." Lyttleton, in discussing the notion of the expanding universe, says it inevitably leads us to the fundamental question of creation itself, creation of matter as some funcamental

property of space.

L.J.

W.