Bridgman P.W. The Physics of High Pressure

London: C.Bell and sons, 1949. — 456 p.This book is intended primarily as a summary of work m which I have been personally engaged in the last twenty-five years in the field of high pressure. It is also intended, however, that the book shall give a fairly complete survey of all the important work in this field; to this end the first chapter is devoted exclusively to historical matters, a historical introduction giving the previous state of the art is appended to many of the later chapters, and in the final chapter on miscellanies the work of others on a number of topics which I have not yet had a chance to touch is discussed in some detail. The references ancTthe index will also facilitate a comprehensive grasp of the whole field.
The book has now been out of print for several years, during which there has been a demand for it deemed sufficient to justify this reprinting by the photographic process. A few modifications have been made, such as are possible within the mechanical limita- tions of the method. These consist mostly in the correction of minor misprints. The most serious modification has been the complete replacement of pages 177 through to the middle of page 183 with new material. The original discussion in those pages was concerned with the five alkali metals and was based to a great extent on calculations in which there was an error of sign, so that the picture there presented, particularly for the behaviour of potassium, was completely misleading. The material substituted for the erroneous material consists of a discussion of the volume relations of the five alkali metals, based on more recent measurements, up to 100,000 kg./cm.L This destroys the continuity of presentation, but seemed necessary in view of the mechanical limitations of the reproduction.
In addition to the reproduction of the original book, this reprinting PREFACE vii contains a suppiement devoted to recent work in the high-pressure field. In this supplement only a brief description will be attempted of some of the work done since the original publication in 1931.
Limitations ot space do not permit a completeness in covering this interval of time, short as it is, at all comparable to the completeness with which the original book covered the entire period of highpressure investigation up to that time. Activity in the highpressure field is rapidly accelerating, and the total number of titles between 1931 and 1948 is greater than for the entire previous history. Furthermore, completeness in the supplement is not as necessary as it might be otherwise, for I have published in Reviews of Modern Physics in January, 1946, an article entitled ' Recent Work in the Field of High Pressures * summarising the work since 1931. This article was almost entirely descriptive in character and did not attempt to reproduce numerical data. The bibliography given with that article was, however, fairly complete, reproducing the full titles of all the papers, so that the numerical data should be recoverable with the expenditure of some effort on the part of the reader. The main emphasis of the supplement will be the same as that of the original book—namely, on my own work—and the principal object of the supplement will be to bring the picture of my ownwork as up to date as possible within the limitations of available space. To this end the appendix of the first printing, containing the titles of my own papers, is now revised by extension to include all the titles up to date, beginning with No. 74. The method of reference to these papers in the body of the text will be the same as before—namely, the number of the paper prefixed by a B