David Appell's "Ten Greatest Predictions in Physics"

Last week, physicist and science writer David Appell published his "Ten Greatest Predictions in Physics" in Physics World magazine.  Conceding that such a list of theoretical physics predictions is bound to be arbitrary, he invited discussion.  This is irresistible bait for DTLR!  However, instead of trying to propose a competing list, I will simply discuss what he has offered.

First, I would like to propose a taxonomy of theoretical physics predictions.  First, I make a distinction between retrospective and prospective predictions.  A retrospective prediction is a prediction of a previously observed phenomenon, perhaps lacking any theoretical explanation at the time.  A prospective prediction is a specific prediction that can then be experimentally or observationally verified, but does not correspond to a previously known phenomenon.  To borrow from Appell's list, Newton's prediction of Kepler's laws of planetary motion firmly belongs in the retrospective category, while Poisson's prediction of the "Arago spot" firmly belongs in the prospective category.

I contend that a prospective prediction lends greater credibility than a retrospective one, as in the latter, the theorist might have been influenced by knowledge of the known phenomenon in crafting his or her theory.  Thus, there may be a subtle "fitting" of the theory with the "facts", during the development of the theory.  This is of course understandable, as there is no point in developing a theory that contradicts known phenomena.  However, a prospective prediction is really going out on a limb - it's taking the ultimate risk for a theory, to predict something utterly new, and possibly wrong, and therefore far more convincing when verified.  Such a prediction most resembles the classic Popperian notion of a falsifiable theory, though in practice, in the face of a failure, theories could sometime be salvaged by later modifications.  Retrospective predictions that fail may often result in theories that never get published to begin with, and may never see the light of day.

However, retrospective predictions remain important and do provide some credibility to a theory.  The retrospective prediction may be made of a phenomenon directly related to a problem the theorist was trying to solve, or it may be to an unrelated physics problem; the latter seems more impressive and seems to provide corroboration along a different line of evidence than the one that inspired the theory.  Further examples are in order.  Max Planck used Boltzmann's energy quantization trick to produce a theory of blackbody radiation.  Planck was explicitly trying to find a theory of such radiation, and the resulting theory was quite consistent with known experimental data.  This is an example of a retrospective prediction concerning directly the problem the theorist was trying to solve.  However, when Einstein took the same hypothesis and used it to explain the photoelectric effect, he was taking a 'quantum leap' of sorts - elevating Planck's ad hoc quantization assumption to a principle of physics, and finding it could solve an apparently unrelated problem.  I surmise that this achievement, rather than Planck's original formulation, is what originally made the nascent quantum theory a serious player in theoretical physics.

So, now let's turn to Appell's list.  I would have to dispute the tenth prediction on the list, Rubin and Ford's prediction of dark matter, as I regard this as a discovery rather than a prediction, albeit a "theoretical" discovery.  Furthermore, it remains experimentally and observationally unknown what this dark matter is, so it is too early to assess.  

That leaves us with nine predictions, and I would categorize them as follows:

Retrospective:

• Newton's derivation of Kepler's laws from his theory of motion and theory of gravitation.
• Maxwell's prediction of the speed of light.
• Einstein's prediction of Mercury's anomalous perihelion precession.

Prospective:

• Poisson's and Fresnel's prediction of the Arago Spot, lending credibility to the wave theory of light.
• Goeppert Mayer's prediction of the second series of transuranic elements.
• Schwinger's prediction of the electron's anomalous magnetic moment.
• Hoyle's prediction of an excited state of carbon-12, a missing link in the theory of the nucleosynthesis of heavy elements.
• Lee and Yang's parity violation in the weak interaction.
• Josephson tunneling.

With the exception of Goeppert-Mayer's case, Appell tells us that the above prospective predictions were quickly verified experimentally.  I presume that the second series of transuranic elements required more time to experimentally discover, one by one; I wish Appell had said more about this.  For the purposes of this discussion I will assume that her predictions were indeed experimentally verified.

Of the prospective predictions, the Arago spot is the most impressive (and dramatic), as described by Appell.  Poisson was opposed to the wave theory, and confronted pro-wave Fresnel with his prediction, in an attempt to falsify the wave theory.  Fresnel admitted the correctness of the prediction, and Arago did the experiment, showing that the Arago spot did exist.  While this was not a decisive blow against the corpuscular theory (nor was Thomas Young's earlier double slit experiment), it certainly contributed to the accumulation of lines of evidence in favor of the wave theory.  

I can think of other consequential prospective predictions:  Dirac's prediction of the positron (confirmed) and magnetic monopole (unconfirmed); Einstein's prediction of length contraction and time dilation, from special relativity; and the prediction of Black Holes and the Higgs boson by multiple theorists.

Let's turn back to the retrospective predictions on Appell's list.  Newton was explicitly trying to solve celestial mechanics with this theory, so its ability to produce Kepler's laws was directly related to his motivation.  Nonetheless, this was likely the first time such a thing had been seen in the history of physics, so my comments should not detract from the towering achievement it represents.  The Maxwell and Einstein predictions were particularly interesting, as both theorists were after much bigger game than merely trying to predict the speed of light or Mercury's anomalous orbit.  Rather, both predictions are like interesting side effects of the resulting theories, yet definitely valuable in establishing their credence.

I will end with some predictions from my field, fluid mechanics.  Kolmogorov's phenomenological theory of turbulence ("K41") has been, to a large extent, experimentally corroborated within an extensive set of flow regimes, as discussed by Davidson (2015).  However, Davidson mentions that there is "anecdotal evidence" that Kolmogorov may have been aware of some 1935 measurements that would have supported one of the scaling laws Kolmogorov derived.  If so, K41 might have to be classified as retrospective rather than prospective, though this could certainly be open to historical dispute.

In Rayleigh-Benard convection, Schmidt & Milverton's 1935 experiments verified the predicted critical Rayleigh number for the onset of thermal convection proposed by Harold Jeffreys in 1928.  This as a prospective prediction.  However, that a critical Rayleigh number triggers the onset of convection in the first place, was first theoretically proposed by Rayleigh in 1916.  According to Koschmieder (1993), Benard himself essentially observed this feature in 1900, without realizing it, and was skeptical as late as 1930 about the critical temperature difference.  Rayleigh was well aware of and motivated by Benard's work.  The critical value of a control parameter at which a stable regime loses stability is now one of the basic pillars of hydrodynamic instability theory.

Reference

P. A. Davidson, 2015:  Turbulence:  An Introduction for Scientists and Engineers.  Second edition.  Oxford University Press, p. 218.

E. L. Koschmieder, 1993:  Benard Cells and Taylor Vortices.  Cambridge University Press.

Nobels Neglect Fluid Dynamics

This month's issue of Physics Today includes a letter to the editor from Rajan Menon, under the headline that I've reproduced as the title of this post.  Prompted by P. W. Anderson's obituary, Menon argues that "well-known physicists have worked in different aspects of fluid mechanics," mentioning Arnold Sommerfeld and Werner Heisenberg.  He then mentions three outstanding fluid dynamicists of the 20th century:  Ludwig Prandtl, Theodore von Karman, and G. I. Taylor.  Menon tells us that both Taylor and von Karman thought that Prandtl deserved a Nobel Prize in Physics.  Certainly all three of these illustrious individuals should have been strong candidates for the Nobel Prize, in my view.

Menon's letter nicely complements a post of mine from 2014, Nobel laureates and fluid dynamics research.  In that post I discuss the one Nobel Physics Prize that did seem to be awarded for research in fluid dynamics (H. Alfven, 1970) as well as the fluid dynamics activities of several other Nobel laureates, both in physics and chemistry, including Heisenberg.  I believe that Menon is essentially correct that "the field of mechanics, has been routinely neglected in considerations for the physics Nobel Prize."  However, aside from Prandtl, von Karman, and Taylor, all now long-dead, it is unclear to me who else should be a candidate.  The list of winners of the APS Fluid Dynamics Prize, for instance, features many outstanding researchers in this field, but what accomplishment would rise to the level of say, Prandtl's boundary layer theory, of such consequence to be honored by a Nobel Prize in physics?  To make the question more concrete, if the Nobel committee were to respond to Menon by selecting a Nobel Physics Prize for research in fluid dynamics next year, who would be the candidates among living fluid dynamicists? 

Menon proposes that if the Clay Mathematics Institute's Millenium Prize for proving the existence and smoothness of solutions to the 3-dimensional Navier-Stokes Equations is ever awarded, that person is deserving of a Nobel Physics Prize as well.  Though I sympathize greatly with Menon's letter, this is the one place I would part company with him.  The solution to this problem is rightly deserving of a top mathematics award, but I do not think it worthy of a Nobel Prize in Physics, simply because it is unclear a priori what physical insight would be gleaned from such a proof.

I would propose that the criteria for a Nobel Physics Prize to be awarded to fluid dynamics should be either for work of a total game-changing nature in the field, like Prandtl's boundary layer theory, or an advance in fluid dynamics that has colossal ripple effects in other areas of physics or technology, like Alfven's work in magnetohydrodynamics, including Alfven waves, which impact on plasma physics and astrophysics.

On the flip side, I do think Nobel physics laureates should continue to contribute their talents to fluid dynamics, as Rayleigh, Purcell, Landau, Onsager, and Chandrasekhar did.

A tribute to the publishers of classic atmospheric science books

The last four posts celebrated the publishers of classic physics books.  Today I'd like to pay homage to publishers of classic atmospheric science books.  Several of the major publishers we've already met - Cambridge University Press, Oxford University Press, Springer, and Wiley - all have major contributions to this literature and appear to remain active in this field.  I will spare readers a laundry list of examples from these publishers.

The main focus of this post is to honor Academic Press, which became an imprint of Harcourt, and now Elsevier.  Wallace & Hobbs' Atmospheric Science:  An Introductory Survey and the 6-volume Encyclopedia of Atmospheric Sciences are signature examples of their portfolio.  However, what "AP" may most be known for is its long-lived International Geophysics Series, which began in 1959 with volume 1, Beno Gutenberg's Physics of the Earth's Interior.  Its most recent volume was published 55 years later, the second edition of Robert Houze's Climate Dynamics, vol. 104 of the series.  The publisher's website lists this as a still-active series, but I do not know of any new volumes since 2014.  Each volume in the series was numbered, and new editions of existing books received their own volume number.

At one time, the series editor was William L. Donn of Columbia University, but later in "my" era (the late 1990s and early 2000s) the editors were Renata Dmowska (Harvard) and James R. Holton (U. Washington), joined later by H. Thomas Rossby (U. Rhode Island).  The series covered all of geophysics, but as the focus today is on atmospheric sciences, let me name a few prominent entries:  Holton's own An Introduction to Dynamic Meteorology, Fleagle & Businger's An Introduction to Atmospheric Physics, Salby's Fundamentals of Atmospheric Physics (a later edition of which is published by Cambridge University Press), Curry & Webster's Thermodynamics of Atmospheres and Oceans, Brown's Fluid Mechanics of the Atmosphere, Cushman-Roisin's Introduction to Geophysical Fluid Dynamics, Gill's Atmosphere-Ocean Dynamics, Arya's Introduction to Micrometeorology, Marshall & Plumb's Atmosphere, Ocean, and Climate Dynamics, Chamberlain's Theory of Planetary Atmospheres, and Wilks' Statistical Methods in the Atmospheric Sciences.  One could go on and on.

In "my" era, the series volumes did not have a uniform "look", unlike the old McGraw-Hill International Series on Pure and Applied Physics, with their green covers with black and gold trim.  Nonetheless, with a 55-year run including many classics, the International Geophysics Series is ubiquitous on atmospheric scientists' bookshelves. 

A tribute to the publishers of classic physics books: Others

I am winding down my tribute to publishers of classic physics books in this post, though future posts will examine publishers in other subjects.

Springer-Verlag, of course, is a huge publisher in mathematics, engineering, and physics.  I already discussed their Lecture Notes series in an earlier post.  They are also the publishers of Walter Thirring's Course in Mathematical Physics and a series of texts lead-authored by Walter Greiner.  Of particular note was their series Springer Tracts in Natural Philosophy, whose yellow covers resembled some of the Springer math texts.  The series is listed as discontinued on the Springer website.  Other highlights include Florian Scheck's Mechanics, Jack Vanderlinde's Classical Electromagnetic Theory (originally published by Kluwer), and Statistical Physics I:  Equilibrium Statistical Mechanics by Toda, Saito, and Kubo.  They also have legendary reference books like the long-out-of-print Handbuch der Physik, and the AIP Physics Desk Reference.  Springer was founded in 1842 by Julius Springer.

Cambridge University Press is another titan, with classics going back to Brian Pippard's The Elements of Classical Thermodynamics (1957) and Chapman & Cowling's The Mathematical Theory of Non-Uniform Gases (first published in 1939).  Examples of notable texts include Kleppner and Kolenkow's An Introduction to Mechanics, Hand & Finch's Analytical Mechanics, Jose & Saletan's Classical Dynamics:  A Contemporary Approach, Zangwill's Modern Electrodynamics, Born & Wolf's Principles of Optics (originally published by Pergamon), and Ralph Baierlein's Thermal Physics.  They also have the Student's Guide series, exemplified by Daniel Fleisch's A Student's Guide to Maxwell's Equations.

Oxford University Press is particularly strong in thermal & statistical physics texts, with examples such as Blundell & Blundell's Concepts in Thermal Physics, Bowley & Sanchez's Introductory Statistical Mechanics, and David Chandler's Introduction to Modern Statistical Mechanics.  They have many others including Hilborn's Chaos and Nonlinear Dynamics and a particularly useful series, the Oxford Master Series in Condensed Matter Physics and a counterpart series for Statistical, Computational, and Theoretical Physics.

Cambridge and Oxford University Presses were founded in 1534 and 1586, respectively, laying claim to be the world's oldest and second-oldest university presses.

Finally I will mention a few publishers with relatively smaller footprints, at least in my collection of physics books.

Methuen's Monographs on Physical Subjects included some gems such as J. W. Leech's Mechanics and Derek F. Lawden's An Introduction to Tensor Calculus and Relativity.  Algernon Methuen founded the company in 1892.

W. H. Freeman, founded in 1946, was an imprint of Macmillan.  Its classic physics texts include Charles Kittel's Introduction to Solid State Physics (now published by Wiley), Kittel & Kroemer's Thermal Physics, Lorrain, Corson, & Lorrain's Electromagnetic Fields and Waves, and Taylor & Wheeler's Spacetime Physics.

W. B. Saunders, originally a medical publisher founded in 1888, was known as the publishers of Raymond Serway's introductory physics textbook, as well as classics such as Marion & Thornton's Classical Dynamics of Particles and Systems, and Ashcroft & Mermin's Solid State Physics.  These are now published by Cengage. Due to a merger with Holt, Rinehart, and Winston, Saunders acquired Grant Fowles' Analytical Mechanics, now also published by Cengage.

For many years, Prentice-Hall was the publisher of David J. Griffiths' Introduction to Electrodynamics and Introduction to Quantum Mechanics, now both published by Cambridge University Press, and Douglas C. Giancoli's introductory physics text, now published by Pearson.  Prentice-Hall was founded in 1913 by Charles Gerstenberg and Richard Ettinger, naming the firm after their mothers' maiden names.

Independent publisher W. W. Norton, founded in 1923 by William Warder Norton and his wife Mary Dows Herder Norton, publishes the MIT Introductory Physics Series (principle author, Anthony P. French) as well as Hans Ohanian's introductory physics textbook.  Speaking of MIT, the MIT Press was the original publisher of the English version of Wolfgang Pauli's Lectures on Physics (now reprinted by Dover).

Academic Press (founded in 1941 by Walter J. Johnson and his brother-in-law Kurt Jacoby) is now part of Elsevier, but was the original publisher of the English version of Arnold Sommerfeld's Lectures on Theoretical Physics.  

Princeton University Press (founded in 1905 by Whitney Darrow) publishes Kip Thorne and Roger Blandford's series, Modern Classical Physics, as well as cosmology books by P. J. E. Peebles, Roger Newton's philosophical essay Thinking About Physics, and Misner, Thorne, and Wheeler's Gravitation.  They also have the Princeton Series in Physics and Einstein's Collected Papers.  Princeton also has a "Nutshell" series, for instance, Anupam Garg's Classical Electromagnetism in a Nutshell, which at over 700 pages is quite a large nut.

University Science Books is a niche player, with notable books by John R. Taylor, Frank Shu, David McQuarrie, and John Townsend.  Another niche publisher is Infinity Science Press, with titles like Ohanian's Classical Electrodynamics.  The Chicago Lectures in Physics are published by the University of Chicago Press, and includes Robert Geroch's Mathematical Physics.  Johns Hopkins University Presss has a few titles of note such as Don Lemons' Mere Thermodynamics.

World Scientific, a Singapore-based publisher started in 1981 by Phua Kok Khoo and Doreen Liu, has a few notable titles such as Kibble & Berkshire's Classical Mechanics (on behalf of Imperial College Press) and Fritz Rohrlich's Classical Charged Particles.

Finally, all physics readers should be grateful to Dover for keeping some of our favorite classics in print.

A tribute to the publishers of classic physics books: John Wiley & Sons

Unlike McGraw-Hill and Pearson, discussed in the last posts, who seem to have downsized their footprints in advanced physics books, John Wiley & Sons continues to maintain an active presence to this day.  Also unlike the previously discussed counterparts, Wiley tends not to place their classic physics books in series; each is a standalone volume.  They can be very proud of their portfolio, as illustrated by the all-stars illustrated in the below photo.

A selection of all-star classic physics texts from Wiley.

The Cohen-Tannoudji books are illustrative of the onetime partnership with French publisher Hermann, which also resulted in co-publication of Order within Chaos, by Berge, Pomeau, and Vidal.  We see also that over the years, Wiley acquired Interscience (a US firm founded by Kurt Enoch around the time of WW2) and German publisher VCH (Verlag Chemie), which was founded by the German Chemical Society in 1921.

Historical note.  Wiley traces its history to Charles Wiley, who started a printshop in 1807.  His  son John took over in 1826, who was in turn succeeded by his own sons William H. and Charles in 1876.

A tribute to the publishers of classic physics books: Addison-Wesley

Continuing the theme from the last post, I'd like to continue my tribute to the publishers of classic physics books by turning to Addison-Wesley, which is now an imprint of Pearson.  Back in its heydey, the publisher had both the Addison-Wesley Series in Physics and Series in Advanced Physics.  As the original US distributor of the English translations of the Landau & Lifschitz Course of Theoretical Physics published by Pergamon, and the original publisher of the Feynman Lectures on Physics, Addison-Wesley was another of the pre-eminent publishers of classic physics books.

Like the McGraw-Hill International Series in Pure and Applied Physics, the older Addison-Wesley books had a distinct "look":  plain front & back covers, with spines indicating the title and author of the book within a colored band.  The color schemes of these books varied more than for their McGraw-Hill counterparts.  Examples of classics include Herbert Goldstein's Classical Mechanics, which ran through 3 editions; Keith Symon's Mechanics, which also ran through 3 editions; Foundations of Electromagnetic Theory, by Reitz, Milford, and Christy, running through 4 editions; Eugene Hecht's Optics (now in its 5th edition); Daniel Schroeder's An Introduction to Thermal Physics (now published by Oxford University Press); Peskin & Schroeder's An Introduction to Quantum Field Theory (now published by Taylor & Francis's CRC Press); and J. J. Sakurai's Modern Quantum Mechanics (whose latest edition is published by Cambridge University Press) and Advanced Quantum Mechanics.

Addison-Wesley's Advanced Book Program also had a series called Lecture Notes and Supplements in Physics, edited by John David Jackson and David Pines, which included Gordon Baym's Lectures on Quantum Mechanics and Bethe & Jackiw's Intermediate Quantum Mechanics.  These two are now published by Taylor & Francis' CRC Press.  Addison-Wesley was also a prolific publisher of math texts, which can also be found on the bookshelves of some of us older physicists.

Today, A-W's successor Pearson still publishes some of these classics, like the Feynman Lectures, Hecht's Optics, and Goldstein's Classical Mechanics.  However, as is evident from the above discussion, many of their other gems are now kept in print by other publishers.  For instance, Elsevier now publishes the English translations of the Landau & Lifschitz course, and Dover publishes the second edition of Jerrold Franklin's Classical Electromagnetism.  

A selection of physics books from Addison-Wesley.  The five on the left show the "classic" cover style of the older ones.

Historical note.  Addison-Wesley was founded in 1942 by Melbourne Wesley Cummings and Lew Addison Cummings, naming the company after their middle names.

A tribute to the publishers of classic physics books: McGraw-Hill

Scientific book publishing is not what it once was.  It is easy now for authors to make PDF versions of their lecture notes and books available on the web at no cost to the user, as alluded to in my post earlier this month.  Other books are available from publishers in electronic form, perhaps accessed by students through university and institutional libraries.  It is possible that the printed scientific book is rapidly becoming a historical artifact.  

This progress seems good and right.  It expands access to these materials by reducing cost, while reaching anyone with access to the Internet.  Perhaps welcome by many is the saving of space on a scientist's bookshelf.  Nonetheless, as a creature of an earlier age, I am a scientific bibliophile.  In their time, scientific books were outrageously successful means of putting knowledge into readers' hands.  I hope to begin a series of occasional blog posts to celebrate the publishers of these artifacts, focusing first on some of the classic textbooks and monographs of physics.

An easy choice for a starting point is McGraw-Hill, whose International Series in Pure and Applied Physics seemed to cover all fields of classical and modern physics.  In their heyday, volumes of this series were recognizable for their green covers with gold trim, embossed on the front with the series title.  The volume's title and author appeared in a black rectangle at the top of their spines.  The series begain in 1929, and some volumes continued to be used well into the 1990s and beyond.  However, I'm not sure whether any new volumes were added after the death of its Consulting Editor, Leonard Schiff, in 1971, nor whether he was replaced.  The first Consulting Editor was F. K. Richtmeyer, who served in the 1930s, followed by Lee A. DuBridge from 1939-1946, and G. P. Harnwell from 1947-1954, followed by Schiff.

One of the series' most prolific authors was John C. Slater of MIT, who contributed around 10 volumes on a range of topics (including classical physics texts co-authored with Nathaniel Frank).  Philip Morse, also of MIT, contributed four volumes (including both volumes of Methods of Theoretical Physics with Herman Feshbach, as well as two books on acoustics, one of which is reprinted by Princeton University Press).  The Morse and Feshbach math methods books were later reprinted by Feshbach's family for a number of years.

The famous text by Feynman & Hibbs, Quantum Mechanics and Path Integrals, first appeared in the series (and remains available as a Dover reprint), as did Max Jammer's The Conceptual Development of Quantum Mechanics, Frederick Seitz's The Modern Theory of Solids, and Microwave Spectroscopy by Nobel laureates Charles Townes and Arthur Schawlow.  To select a couple other areas of physics, consider classical mechanics, where the series published Becker's Introduction to Theoretical Mechanics, Barger & Olsson's Classical Mechanics:  A Modern Perspective, and Lindsay's Mechanical Radiation.  In electricity and magnetism, the series featured books authored by Harnwell, Smythe, and Stratton; the latter kept in print by Wiley on behalf of the IEEE.  In the kinetic theory of gases, the monographs by Kennard and Present appeared in the series.  Other notable titles include Michael Tinkham's Group Theory and Quantum Mechanics (still in print with Dover), Francis Bitter's Introduction to Ferromagnetism, Leon Brillouin's Wave Propagation in Periodic Structures (at one time reprinted by Dover, but out of print now), and Schiff's own Quantum Mechanics, which ran through 3 editions.  I'm sure that older readers could name their own favorites too, or at least recognize some famous names in the list of authors and titles.

McGraw-Hill had another series, of undergraduate textbooks, called Fundamentals of Physics, edited by E. U. Condon.  I own two of the upper-division volumes of this series, Fundamentals of Statistical and Thermal Physics, by Frederick Reif, and Edgar Kraut's Fundamentals of Mathematical Physics, both still available as reprints from Waveland Press and Dover, respectively.

McGraw-Hill of course was also the publisher of the Berkeley Physics Course, a five-volume series meant to form a 2-year undergraduate physics sequence.  The most successful volume was Edward M. Purcell's Electricity and Magnetism, the only one to appear in a second edition, which remains in print now with Cambridge University Press.  Another classic in this series was Frank Crawford's Waves, which I mentioned in my earlier post.

In 1967 McGraw-Hill acquired Schaum's Outline Series, founded by Daniel Schaum, and continues to publish these books today.  These books (meant to supplement the main text of the course) range over multiple academic disciplines, not just physics.  As far as I know, of the four series discussed here, Schaum's is the only one that McGraw-Hill actively maintains. 

Outside these series of physics books, McGraw-Hill published others of course, like Mark Zemansky's Heat and Thermodynamics, which ran through 7 editions, and Jenkins & White's Fundamentals of Optics, which ran through 4 editions.  They also had another series called the International Series in Pure and Applied Mathematics, of which Dettman's Mathematical Methods in Physics and Engineering is worthy of note (again, still available as a Dover reprint).

Many of McGraw-Hill's physics books have attained classic status, and reprint editions are available for many of them by other publishers, as is evident from the above discussion.  These books have endured beyond their original publisher's interest in them.  While McGraw-Hill remains very active in the introductory physics textbook market, and still publishes some upper division texts, they don't seem to be major players in the latter, nor in the monograph sector of the market.  Thus, this tribute is mainly to past glories, with hope that some of the finest examples remain accessible to physicists of the future.

A family portrait of selected McGraw-Hill volumes in the International Series in Pure and Applied Physics.

Historical note.  McGraw-Hill has its roots in the publishing firms of James H. McGraw, who acquired the American Journal of Railway Appliances in 1888, and John A. Hill, who at the time was an editor of the Locomotive Engineer.  Hill formed his own publisher in 1902, and the two men merged their book operations in 1909.  Upon Hill's death in 1916, the remainder of their publishing companies unified to form the McGraw-Hill Publishing Company in 1917.