The Physical Review: The First Hundred Years.

"The investigation reported in this paper was begun as the result of an accident which occurred in this laboratory in April 1925."

So begins an article published in the December 1927 Physical Review. In this report, Clinton J. Davisson and Lester H. Germer of Bell Telephone Laboratories in New York described the first experimental evidence that particles can behave as if they were also waves. They demonstrated that a single crystal diffracts electrons in much the same way that it diffracts X rays to create a characteristic pattern of beam intensities.

Their introduction goes on: "At that time we were continuing an investigation . . . of the distribution-in-angle of electrons scattered by a target of ordinary (polycrystalline) nickel. During the course of this work a liquid-air bottle exploded at a time when the target was at a high temperature; the experimental tube was broken, and the target heavily oxidized by the inrushing air . . . . When the experiments were continued it was found that the distribution-in-angle of the scattered electrons had been completely changed."

The explosion had melted the nickel target, and upon cooling, the nickel had resolidified into a single crystal. Davisson and Germer could then observe, to their surprise, that the crystal deflected electrons only in certain directions rather than dispersing them evenly.

The Davisson-Germer paper is one of 200 included in a new book consisting of noteworthy articles reprinted from the Physical Review and Physical Review Letters, along with commentaries and overviews. A CD-ROM edition that accompanies the 1,250-page volume contains a sampling of 1,000 important papers drawn from these journals. Published jointly by the American Institute of Physics and the American Physical Society, the compendium is called The Physical Review: The First Hundred Years.

Among the top 200, one finds Robert A. Millikan on determining the elementary electric charge (1913), Carl D. Anderson on the discovery of the antimatter counterpart of the electron (1933), Albert Einstein, Boris Podolsky, and Nathan Rosen (1935) on the strangeness of quantum mechanics (with a later reply by Niels Bohr), Hans A. Bethe on energy production in stars (1939), John Bardeen and Walter H. Brattain on the invention of the transistor (1948), and Richard P. Feynman on a spacetime approach to quantum electrodynamics (1949).

More recent entries include Alan H. Guth on the inflationary universe (1981), Gerd Binnig and his collaborators on scanning tunneling microscopy (1982), and Dan Shechtman and his coworkers on quasicrystals (1984).

"An examination, even if cursory, of the papers published [over the last 100 years] . . . shows a constant interplay among theory, experiment, the invention of new techniques and instrumentation to advance the experiment, and unforeseen applications of the new techniques," notes H. Henry Stroke of New York University in New York City, who edited the volume. "It is also interesting to observe that many fundamental contributions came from a few forward-looking industrial research centers."

Of course, some important developments and papers are missing because they were published in other scientific journals or they remained classified for a considerable period, as in the case of nuclear fission. In a few instances, such as the first realization of the laser, the original paper was rejected by Physical Review. Nonetheless, this collection represents a remarkable record of achievement in physics.