Robert T. Beyer

Hurdling the language barrier

When a scientist sets to work in his laboratory today, anywhere in the world, he can be assured that groups of other scientists in a dozen or more places, are engaged in work on the same problem, or on a closely related one. It would be of help for this scientist to know what the others had already done, what they were attempting, and what might be tried by them in the future. How does he go about finding this information?

Acoustics conference in Moscow

In the spring of this year, a number of American acousticians, the author included, received invitations from the Planning Commission of the Fourth All‐Union Conference on Acoustics to attend a May meeting in Moscow and deliver a paper on an appropriate topic. The opportunity of seeing Soviet science at first hand was too good to be missed, and, having made all the usual arrangements, I left New York on May 23, flying via Copenhagen and Stockholm.

A New Wave of Acoustics.

In 1946, Richard Feynman, giving a contributed paper at a meeting of the American Physical Society, remarked that the allotted time was not long enough for him to read his abstract (it was a peculiarly long one), but only enough for him to point out the errors in it. In a similar vein, modern acoustics is so broad that the space allowed here is scarcely enough to reprint the PACS classification of the subject, let alone to instruct or entertain. Acoustics today is a festival of the applications of physics, both theoretical and experimental. We must therefore restrict ourselves to a sampling of topics, ranging from acoustical devices as ancient as the guinea pigs ear (figure 1) to others as modern as the electron‐acoustic microscopic (figure 2).

Acoustics as a physical science

In late 1969, the National Academy of Sciences created a committee, chaired by D. Allan Bromley of Yale University, to survey the state of physics. In due course, Bromley organized a set of panels, dividing physics into such recognizable areas as nuclear physics, elementary particles, condensed matter and the like. The first part of the report of this committee has now appeared, and more will follow.