An astrophysical primer

Abstract

From a distance this looks like yet another conference or Festschrift proceedings–overpriced and underpublished. Open its pages and you will be pleasantly surprised. In seeking to honour Professor Edwin Salpeter on the occasion of his sixtieth birthday the convenors of the symposium in his honour and the editors of this volume wanted to do something a little different and a little better than tradition alone demands. The authors of the thirteen chapters are active scientists of the highest calibre spanning the whole of astrophysics. They have produced a beautiful series of explanatory articles intended for students and others seeking to read the pulse of present-day astrophysics. Each focuses upon an area of impressive advance wherein the application of physics to astronomical phenomena has led to dramatic new understandings. Yet each of the fields chosen for review is pregnant with unsolved problems and a springboard for the thinking of new graduate students. The authors have managed to achieve, either by telepathy or fortuitous accident, a remarkable uniformity of level in their treatments which give this work the feel of an introductory textbook by a single author rather than a collection of disjoint pieces. The publishers have played their part by attractive typesetting and adequate indexing. This is a ‘real’ book, not a camera-ready proceedings.