CALIFORNIA INSTITUTE OF TECHNOLOGY
PASADENA
GATES CHEMICAL LABORATORY
November 29, 1927
Dear Pauling:
I was glad to get Goudsmit’s letter.
In view of the face that the monograph will be used by students and researchers
in physics even more than by those in chemistry, it is probably unwise to publish
it as a Chemical Monograph if another publisher can be promptly secured. I am not
at all sure, however, that It will be much used as a class text-book. Probably it
would be mainly bought by individual advanced students in physics and physical chemistry
and by investigators in those fields and in astrophysics. Books on small parts of
a science, such as radioactivity, spectroscopy, photochemistry, are seldom used even
by graduate classes, who commonly want the whole of a subject (such at least as sub-atomic
physics and chemistry) presented concisely in a singly book. I have rather hoped our
C.I.T. group might get out such a sub-atomic text-book, using Goudsmit’s treatment
as an integral part of it, but it is perhaps too difficult to arrange.
I do not know whether MacMillan is the best publisher for a book of this kind;
but have no better suggestion to make. He isn’t keen after new books, as the McGraw-Hill
Company are; and he is likely to make considerable delay. They will want to see the
final manuscript before they will agree to publish it.
I hope Goudsmit’s presentation is really clear and intelligible – not written
like Hund’s book for people who know half the subject already.
The only possibility I see of getting him out here would be during next summer, in
view of his Ann Arbor position.
Yours sincerely,
Arthur A. Noyes
