PREFACE TO THE THIRD EDITION
The first edition of this book w as published in 1965 and the second in 1970. The book continued to sell
well during the 1970s and, once it was out of print, pressure developed for a new edition to be prepared.
The subject had grown greatly during the 1970s and R. W. C. hesitated to undertake the task alone. He is
immensely grateful to P. H. for converting into a pleasure what would otherwise have been an intol-
erable burden!
The second edition contained 22 chapters. In the present edition, 8 of these 22 have been thoroughly
revised by the same authors as before, while the others have been ent rusted to new contributors, some
being divided into pairs of chapters. In addition, seven chapters have been commiss ioned on new
themes. The difficult decision was taken to leave out the chapter on superpure metals and to replace it
by one focused on solute segregation to interfaces and surfacesda topic that has made major
strides during the past decade and which is of great practical significance. A name index has also been
added.
Research in physical metal lurgy has become worldwide and this is re flected in the fact that the
contributors to this edition live in no fewer than seven countries. We are proud to ha ve been able to edit
a truly international text, both of us having worked in several countries ourselves. We would like here to
express our thanks to all our co ntributors for their hard and effective work, their promptness and their
angelic patience with editorial pressures!
The length of the book has inevitably increased, by 50% over the second edition, which was itself
20% longer than the first edition. Even to contain the increase within these numbers has entailed
draconian limitations and difficult choices; these were unavoidable if the book was not to be priced out
of its market. Everything possible has been done by the editors and the publisher to keep the price to
a minimum (to enable readers to take the advice of G. Chr. Lichtenberg (1775): “He who has two pairs
of trousers should pawn one and buy this book”.).
Two kinds of chapters have been allowed priority in allocating space: those covering very active fields
and those concerned with the most basic topics such as phase transformations, including solidification
(a central theme of physica l metallurgy), defects, an d diffusion. Als o, this time we have devoted more
space to experimental methods and their underlying principles, microscopy in particular. Since there is
a plethora of texts available on the standard aspects of X-ray diffraction, the chapter on X-ray and
neutron scattering has been designed to emphasize less familiar aspects. Because of space limitations,
we regretfully decided that we could not include a chapter on corrosion.
This revised and enlar ged edition can properly be regarded as to all intents and purposes a new book.
Sometimes it was difficult to draw a sharp dividing line between physical metallurgy and process
metallurgy, but we have done our best to observe the distinction and to restrict the book to its intended
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