The new AIP handbook

JUL 01, 1963

The American Institute of Physics Handbook, first published in 1957, has been expanded and brought up a date in a revised second edition. This summary of the main changes to be found in the new edition has been written by Dwight E. Gray of the Office of Scientific Information of the National Science Foundation. D. E. Gray has served as the coordinating editor of the AIP Handbook.

DOI: 10.1063/1.3051015

Dwight E. Gray

What is a handbook? The word “handbook” seems to have received its start in life as the English form of the German “handbuch”, with the adoption not always having received complete approval. In his English, Past and Present (1871), Richard Chenevix Trent refers to this handbuch‐to‐handbook caper and says, “Possessing the word ‘manual’, we need not have called ‘handbook’ back from an oblivion of 900 years.” James A. H. Murray, in A New English Dictionary on Historical Principles (1901), gives the 900 A.D. definition of the Old English “handboc” as “a small book or treatise”.

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Dwight E. Gray, National Science Foundation.