Molecular attraction of condensed bodies

From the Editorial Board. As a contribution to commemorating the 100th anniversary of the birth of Evgenii Mikhailovich Lifshitz, it was found appropriate by the Editorial Board of Uspekhi Fizicheskikh Nauk (UFN) [Physics–Uspekhi] journal that the materials of the jubilee-associated Scientific Session of the Physical Sciences Division of the Russian Academy of Sciences published in this issue (pp. 877–905) be augmented by the review paper “Molecular attraction of condensed bodies” reproduced from a 1958 UFN issue. Included in this review, in addition to an account by Evgenii Mikhailovich Lifshitz of his theory of molecular attractive forces between condensed bodies (first published in Zhurnal Eksperimental'noi i Teoreticheskoi Fiziki (ZhETF) in 1955 and in its English translation Journal of Experimental and Theoretical Physics (JETP) in 1956), is a summary of a series of experimental studies beginning in 1949 by Irina Igorevna Abrikosova at the Institute of Physical Chemistry of the Academy of Sciences of the USSR in a laboratory led by Boris Vladimirovich Derjaguin (1902–1994), a Corresponding Member of the USSR Academy of Sciences. In 1958, however, UFN was not yet available in English translation, so the material of the review is insufficiently accessible to the present-day English-speaking reader. This is the reason why the UFN Editorial Board decided to contribute to celebrating the 100th anniversary of E M Lifshitz's birthday by reproducing on the journal's pages a 1958 review paper which contains both E M Lifshitz's theory itself and the experimental data that underpinned it (for an account of how Evgenii Mikhailovich Lifshitz was enlisted to explain the experimental results of I I Abrikosova and B V Derjaguin, see the letter to the editors N P Danilova on page 925 of this jubilee collection of publications).