edited by M Shifman, three volumes, World Scientific, ISBN 9810244452, set £112.
As would be expected from such a meticulous editor (see The Supersymmetric World – The Beginnings of the Theory edited by G Kane and M Shifman, World Scientific, ISBN 981024522X), these three volumes contain a wealth of well-prepared and highly valuable information. They bring together 33 reviews covering all aspects of the analytical aspects of the theory of quantum chromodynamics (QCD), assembled to mark the 75th birthday of Boris Ioffe. The majority of the work provides an encyclopedia of QCD that is useful for students and for research workers.
The first part of the work is more historical, and it includes contributions from Ludwig Faddeev on quantizing Yang-Mills fields, and from David Gross on the discovery of asymptotic freedom and the emergence of QCD. These are followed by an amusing aside by Shifman: “How the asymptotic freedom of the Yang-Mills Field could have been discovered three times before Gross, Wilczek and Politzer, but was not”.
Introducing all of this is the material specifically on Ioffe and on events in Russia at the end of the 20th century, with very useful editorial explanations. After the introductory festschrifts, Boris Ioffe’s Top Secret Assignment (which won the 1999 Novy Mir prize after being published in that magazine) and Yuri Orlov’s Snapshots from the 1950s (based on excerpts from Orlov’s book Dangerous Thoughts – William Morrow 1991, New York) are full of fascinating insights.
