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The Physical Review: The First Hundred Years

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Though not for the faint of heart, this collection of papers is among the most valuable references available for the serious student of physics. As the papers included in this compilation are the original versions first published in The Physical Review, the text is necessarily somewhat opaque to those not already knowledgeable in the specific field of inquiry being covered. Nonetheless, the quality of the information contained in this volume is beyond par, as original papers on nearly every facet of modern physics are included in this book. Works by such luminaries as Millikan, Einstein, Bohr, Feynman, Dirac, Schrodinger and many others appear in their original form in this volume, so you can see first hand how the ideas that shook 20th century physics originally arose, evolved and ultimately gained acceptance among the scientific community.

The text itself is divided into a number of topical subsections where the development of a given field is traced chronologically through its major milestones and discoveries in this century. The topics thus covered include atomic, nuclear, statistical, cosmological, condensed matter, plasma, elementary particle and quantum mechanical physics. The accompanying CD ROM contains over 1,000 additional articles on said subjects (equivalent to an additional 7,400 pages of text), though the digital storage of said media suffers a bit in quality and the Windows 3.1 era viewer for the documents leaves much to be desired. Overall, however, this volume is an excellent work, and definitely worth while for the serious student of physics.

this book, together with the CD offer a greate resource in physics. the book itself is a collection of excellent papers of the previous century. the data in CD is so well organized that makes a fantastic resource for research work.