Frank Woodbridge Constant
Personal Information
Description
(From the dust jacket of Theoretical Physics, edited to the past tense.) F. Woodbridge Constant was a graduate of Princeton University and Yale University, where he received the Ph.D. in physics in 1928 and held Sloane and Loomis Fellowships. He was a National Research Fellow at the California Institute of Technology from 1928 to 1930, and a member of the faculty of Duke University during the years 1930-33 and 1934-46, first as Instructor, and later as Assistant Professor and then Associate Professor. Professor Constant's sabbatical leave during 1933-34 was spent in Cambridge, England where he studied under Dirac and assisted Sir John Cockcroft in nuclear research. From 1942 to 1946 he was a research physicist in a sound ranging project of the National Defense Research Committee of the Office of Scientific Research and Development. From 1946 until his retirement, Dr. Constant was Jarvis Professor of Physics and Head of the Physics Department at Trinity College, Hartford, Connecticut. He wrote a number of research papers on magnetism, and was a Fellow of the American Physical Society.
Books
Fundamental Principles of Physics
(From the Preface) This is primarily a textbook for a one-semester liberal arts physics course at the college level; however, it could also serve as the basic text, accompanied by supplemental reading, for a more leisurely one-year course. This book is a shortened and less mathematical version of the author's Fundamental Laws of Physics, with less space devoted to classical mechanics and electromagnetism and more to the recent concepts of atomic and nuclear physics, elementary particles, symmetry and conservation principles, and the basic forces of nature.
Fundamental Laws of Physics
(From the inside front cover of the dust jacket) This is primarily a text for a liberal arts physics course at the college level. It is concerned with the philosophy, the methods, and the fundamental concepts and postulates of physical science. Physics is taken as the basic science and the laws of physics are shown to form the foundations of astronomy, chemistry, and physical sciences in general. The emphasis is on methods and fundamental principles rather than the memorization of soon-forgotten facts. Each of the fundamental laws of physics is covered in a separate chapter illustrating how the law was conceived, what it means, and how it may be applied. Basic laws are clarified by showing their application to topics of current interest. Another unique feature is the inclusion of laboratory experiments at the end of many chapters.