The Story of Spin [Review]


	
	
	




	Issues in Science and Technology Librarianship
	Spring 1998



	DOI:10.5062/F4C24TFG


 


Book Reviews


The Story of Spin



Diane Fortner

Physics Library

University of California, Berkeley

dfortner@library.berkeley.edu
 


The Story of Spin. Sin-itiro (Shinichireo) Tomonaga. Chicago: University of 
Chicago Press, 1997. 850p. $50.00 (ISBN 0-226-80793-2)



Translated from the Japanese by Takeshi Oka from a 1974 book, Spin wa meguru,
this series of lectures by Sin-itiro Tomonaga, a renowned theoretical physicist, focuses on
the pioneers of quantum physics from the early 1920's to the late 1930's.  The lectures
follow a meandering pathway through discrete insights to collective "quantum leaps" of
understanding. All the greats -- Werner Heisenberg, Wolfgang Pauli, Paul Dirac, Niels Bohr,
and others -- are mentioned as Tomonaga traces the crucial steps in the story of atomic
spin and its statistics.  In the account of electron spin, the story line moves from Ralph
de Laer Kronig to Pauli and his rejection of Kronig's idea, to the Uhlenbeck-Goudsmit
self-rotating conjecture and their indecisiveness about their paper submitted to
Naturwissenschaften, to L. H. Thomas, and back to the perfectionist, Pauli,
and his approval. 

It is one of Physics' strengths that it has long been an international field.  Tomonaga was
personally acquainted with some of these famous scientists.  He visited their institutes
and listened to their talks. This breadth of connection allows him to pepper these formal
lectures with anecdotes.  Tomonaga's unhurried, precise review of the thinking and attitude
of the physicists involved during this time of incredible creative energy lend a particular
interest to these lectures.  One of the best parts of the books is the last.  He ends with
personal reminiscences of physics in Japan and internationally during the 1920's and
1930's, and his own beginnings as a theoretical physicist. 


Tomonaga, who died in 1979, won the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1965 for his work in the
development of quantum electrodynamics.  He shared the prize with Feynman and Schwinger. 
Like Feynman, he was noted for his popular, accessible essays on basic physics.  He wrote a
well-known two-volume history of physics and a two-volume text that was translated into
English, Quantum Mechanics. 


Although the topic of spin threads throughout, Chapter 8 on spin and statistics may be
called the heart of the book.  Although rules apply and can be stated, spin "is the most
subtle and ingenious design of Nature -without it the whole universe would collapse." 


It would be difficult to imagine American university students today listening to these
series of lectures.  Perhaps the same can be said of young Japanese scientists.  There are
several chapters that will be comprehensible only to advanced physicists.  I would
recommend this book as a rich historical account, of interest to physicists, chemists, and
the scientifically literate public.  Many readers should be able, as I have, to read around
the mathematics to find the excitement of this wonderful period in the history of physics,
in this story, as the author puts it, of how spin "spins".