ANDRADE, Edward Neville da Costa

The Mechanism of Nature

(London: G. Bell and Sons Ltd), 1937

Revised edition, extensively annotated by Andrade

pp. xii, 188; 13 leaves of manuscript additions laid in

The copy of Andrade’s popular book The Mechanism of Nature (first published in 1930) used by him to prepare the updated version, published as An Approach to Modern Physics in 1956.

The Mechanism of Nature was a highly successful work, reissued many times through the 1930s and 1940s. By the 1950s Andrade decided to repurpose his book, acknowledging that ‘The past twenty years or so have seen such advances in physical science that a new reprint would give a very defectivean unbalanced picture of the present situation.’

The present volume is Andrade’s attempt to retain the structure and much of the prose of The Mechanism, while incorporating the many changes in physics in the 1940s and early 1950s.

In addition to many small stylistic changes and additions to the text, Andrade here begins the task of incorporating, as he put it in the preface to An Approach,

the investigations carried out with the great particle accelerators and by intensive research on cosmic rays, [...] radiocarbon dating, developments of the electron microscope and of supersonics [...] the general development of wave mechanics and an increasing relization of the wider significance of the uncertainty principle originally put forward by Heisenberg.

The volume contains thirteen sheets of notes, and bears annotations to 147 of the book’s 188 pages.

Good condition: some of the plates have been trimmed, presumably by Andrade.