Rare books from Atticus Rare Books

Lancaster: American Physical Society, 1957. 1st Edition. FIRST EDITION IN ORIGINAL WRAPS of the existence of the KL Meson. The long-lived neutral kaon is called the KL ("K-long") and decays primarily into three pions. In particle physics, a kaon also called a K meson and denoted K is any one of a group of four mesons distinguished by the fact that they carry a quantum number called strangeness. In the quark model they are understood to contain a strange quark (or antiquark), paired with an up or down antiquark (or quark). CONDITION & DETAILS: Lancaster: American Physical Society 105, March 15, 1957. Very slight and small scuff on rear wrap; small spot on front wrap. Very good condition.

Berlin: Julius Springer. 1st Edition. FIRST EDITION OF THE FIRST MATHEMATICALLY CORRECT FORMULATION OF THE HEISENBERG UNCERTAINTY PRINCIPLE. In quantum mechanics, "the uncertainty principle is any of a variety of mathematical inequalities asserting a fundamental limit to the precision with which certain pairs of physical properties of a particle, such as position x and momentum p, can be known simultaneously. The more precisely the position of some particle is determined, the less precisely its momentum can be known and vice versa. In "Zur quantenmechanik einfacher bewegungstypen," or "Quantum mechanics of simple types of motion, Earle Kennard correctly derived the formula for uncertainty of position and momentum only a few months after Heisenberg stated his principle. While on a sabbatical from Cornell and at the University of Gottingen in 1926, Kennard had learned the new quantum mechanics directly from Heisenberg and Jordan. With that knowledge and his deep understanding of Heisenberg's work,… Read More

Paris: Gauthier-Villars, 1925. First French edition of Zur Elektrodynamik bewegter Korper (On the Electrodynamics of Moving Bodies) and 1st die Tragheit eines Korpers von seinem Energieinhalt abhangig? (Does the Inertia of a Body Depend on its Energy Content?). Both 1905 treatises are "beyond compare and without precedent, one of the greatest scientific achievements in content and one of the most brilliant in style" (Gosling, Albert Einstein). The first paper is "a landmark in the development of physics, one of the two papers that laid out the theory of special relativity, formulated a new conception of time. By assuming that the speed of light is the same to every observer moving at a constant velocity, Einstein showed that space and time were not independent: spacetime was born. According to Hermann Weyl in 1918, this theory ‘led to the discovery that time is associated as a fourth coordinate on an equal footing with the other three coordinates of space, and that the scene of material events,… Read More

1st Edition. FIRST EDITIONS IN MINT CONDITION AND IN ORIGINAL WRAPS of Abraham Wald's seminal work on sequential tests of statistical hypotheses. Before Wald, the traditional style of statistical decision was to posit a hypothesis, make a predetermined number of measurements, then make a decision whether to accept or reject the hypothesis. Wald realized that this procedure is quite wasteful, and that many measurements could be saved if given the option to decide at every step whether to continue or stop the measurement process. "According to Wald, the resulting ‘sequential probability ratio test frequently results in a savings of about 50 percent in the number of observations over the most efficient test procedure based on a fixed number of observations" (Gass, An Annotated Timeline of Operations Research, 65). In these papers Wald, known now as "the father of sequential analysis and decision theory," first presents the theoretical foundations of the theory of sequential analysis. The ideas he… Read More

London: Royal Society, 1931. 1st Edition. FIRST EDITION OF DIRAC'S PREDICTION OF A NEW ELEMENTARY PARTICLE - THE POSITRON - ALONG WITH MAGNETIC MONOPOLES. Though not taken terribly seriously at the time, in 1973 "Heisenberg generously called it...perhaps the biggest jump of all big jumps in physics of our century" (Kragh, Quantum Generations, 191). In 1928, Paul Dirac formulated the so-called "Dirac equation" which describes the behavior of fermions and "was the first theory to account fully for special relativity in the context of quantum mechanics" (Wikipedia). Dirac's new theory, however, did have a problem: the Dirac equation "formally included solutions with negative energy. Contrary to the situation in classical physics, these could not be dismissed as nonphysical but had to be taken seriously - that is, somehow to be related to some objects of nature. In 1929, Dirac believed he had found the solution to the problem... of electrons having negative kinetic energy" (ibid 190). Dirac wrote to… Read More

Princeton: Association for Symbolic Logic, 1959. 1st Edition. FIRST EDITION, FIRST IMPRESSION IN PRISTINE ORIGINAL WRAPS OF SAUL KRIPKE'S SEMINAL FIRST PAPER ON MODAL LOGIC, "A Completeness Theorem in Modal Logic". The paper presents Kripke's important ideas on the semantics of modal logic, or the logic of modal notions like necessity and possibility. Included are all 4 Journal issues for 1959, one of which is inclusive of abstracts of 3 other papers Kripke sent to the Journal. "Universally hailed" for this work, in this paper, Kripke both proves the formal completeness of modal logic (supplemented by first-order quantifiers and the sign of equality) and "create[s] a semantics, now called Kripke semantics" (Hurley, Logic: The Essentials, 217). Kripke semantics "is a formals semantics for non-classical logic systems... first conceived for modal logics, and later adapted to intuitionistic logic and other non-classical systems. The discovery of Kripke semantics was a breakthrough in the theory of… Read More

Leipzig: von Wilhelm Engelmann. 1st Edition. EXTREMELY RARE FOLIO FIRST EDITIONS OF BOTH VOLUMES of Johann Repsold's massive and lavishly-illustrated reference work on astronomical instruments and the history of astronomy. The volumes were issued separately, Volume I in 1908 and Volume II in 1914; together they house 323 plates of uncommon astronomical instruments and their components. Volume I is a detailed survey and analysis of the development of astronomy, including astronomers and instrument makers from the years 1450 to 1830. Volume II surveys the bulk of 19th century advancements, covering the years 1830 to 1900. Johann Adolf Repsold (1838-1919) was the son and grandson of two pioneering German instrument makers. "Johann Adolf Repsold's own designs contributed significantly to the progress of contemporary astronomy... He also wrote important biographical and technical works on the history of astronomy" (Dictionary of Scientific Biography, XI, p. 378). Among the astronomers and instrument… Read More

Hanover: Carl Meyer, 1865. 1st German Edition. HANDSOMELY BOUND FIRST GERMAN EDITION (INCLUSIVE OF ITS ORIGINAL WRAPS) OF GAUSS' MASTERFUL WORK ON CELESTIAL MECHANICS & MATHEMATICAL STATISTICS. The work was first published in Latin in 1809 as "Theoria motus corporum coelestium in sectinibus conicis solem ambientum" ["Theory of the Motion of the Heavenly Bodies Moving about the Sun in Conic Sections"]. Gauss' work systematically develops his methods of orbital calculation and demonstrated his ability to accurately calculate and predict orbital location, including the theory and use of least squares," which is here applied for the first time (DSB). It introduced the Gaussian gravitational constant along with the first application of the normal distribution to observational errors" (History of Science: The Wenner Collection). The astronomical methodology Gauss described in Theory Motus required only a few modifications for use with computers and is still in use today. Gauss believed that "the… Read More

American Institute of Physics, 1939. 1st Edition. ORIGINAL WRAPS, NEAR FINE CONDITION. 1st EDITION OF TWO (within a single journal issue) SEMINAL PAPERS IN THE HISTORY OF PHYSICS, one by Bohr & Wheeler and one by Oppenheimer & Snyder. BOHR & WHEELER'S "The Mechanism of Nuclear Fission" is the first fully worked out theory of nuclear fission and it laid the groundwork for atomic and hydrogen bombs. "The paper is a masterpiece of clear thinking and lucid writing. It reveals, at the center of the mystery of fission, a tiny world where everything can be calculated and everything understood. The tiny world is a nucleus of uranium 236, formed when a neutron is freshly captured by a nucleus of uranium 235. The uranium 236 nucleus sits precisely on the border between classical and quantum physics." By studying this process in detail, they show how the complementary views provided by classical and quantum pictures are both essential to the understanding of nature. Without the combined power of classical… Read More

Lynn, MA: Thos. P. Nichols & Son Co, 1915. 1st Edition. FIRST EDITION, OFFPRINT IN ORIGINAL WRAPPERS OF VOLUME I OF LOWELL'S PREDICTION OF THE EXISTENCE OF A PLANET BEYOND THE ORBIT OF NEPTUNE, here also calculating its probable position. 9 plates are included. Lowell's 1903 hunch about the existence of a ninth planet led him, in 1905, to organize his observatory staff and task them with carrying out a systematic search for "a planet out there as yet unseen by man" (Lowell, Lowell Observatory, The Story of Pluto). Eleven years later, the product of that work was the mathematical, observational, and photographic studies he then published in 1915 - the work offered here -- Memoir on a Trans-Neptunian Planet.' While Lowell died the following year, his work survived his death and "culminated in 1930 with the discovery of Pluto at Lowell Observatory by Clyde W. Tombaugh" (Schindler, Pluto and Lowell Observatory). "The first phase of Percival Lowell's hunt for Planet X ran from 1905 to 1909 . Lowell… Read More

Berlin: Vieweg und Springer, 1926. 1st Edition. Bound FIRST EDITION OF BORN, HEISENBERG, & JORDAN'S "MONUMENTAL" THREE-MAN PAPER, ‘ON QUANTUM MECHANICS II', THE FIRST COMPLETE STATEMENT OF MATRIX MECHANICS (Peacock, Quantum Revolution, 52). Handsomely rebound. See details below. In this work, Born, Heisenberg, and Jordan extend the methods Heisenberg presented in his initial 1925 paper and apply them to a number of important problems. "This paper definitively set forth [and first named] matrix mechanics — the version of quantum mechanics based on the algebraic manipulation of matrices that represent observable quantities such as position, momentum, and energy. Detailed calculations showed that the new matrix mechanics was very successful in predicting the anomalous Zeeman Effect, other forms of line splitting, and line intensities. The three authors even produced a new derivation of Planck's Law" (ibid). In the early 1920s there were fundamental difficulties in atomic physics. The quantum… Read More

London: J. Johnson. THE FIRST OF DARWIN'S FOUR MAJOR WORKS, THE BOTANIC GARDEN" IS OFFERED HERE IN TWO HANDSOMELY BOUND VOLUMES (Dictionary of Scientific Biography, III, 578-579). Erasmus Darwin (1732-1802) was a remarkable polymath, working as a physician, naturalist, medical botanist, and inventor. He was also Charles Darwin's grandfather. The Botanic Garden is an annotated scientific poem in Augustan couplets. It appeared in two parts, of which the second, The Loves of the Plants (1789), was published before the first, The Economy of Vegetation (1791). "Darwin decided to publish the second part of the work first because it was better suited "to entertain and charm." The first part of the work is more ambitious than the second, covering all natural philosophy, and embodying many of the researches and inventions of Wedgwood, Watt, Boulton, and others. The design of the totality was, Darwin wrote, ‘To enlist Imagination under the banner of Science... to induce the ingenious to cultivate the… Read More

Berlin: Julius Springer, 1925. 1st Edition. FIRST EDITION OF THE ANNOUNCEMENT OF PAULI'S EXCLUSION PRINCIPLE giving a criterion for the electronic structure of atoms, and explaining the periodic table and the combining properties of the elements. Specifically, the Pauli exclusion principle states that no two "fermions" (elementary particles with half-integer spin such as electrons, protons and neutrons) may occupy the same "quantum state" (i.e., the same unique set of the quantum numbers) within an atom. This is one of the most important principles in physics, because electrons occupy shells at increasing distance from the nucleus and there are limits to the number of electrons that may occupy a given shell (2n2 electrons in the nth shell). This gives an atom a physical size, and this underpins the stability of matter. The electron is now known to have four quantum numbers, three of which ("shell," "subshell" and "orbital") relate to the location of the electron within the atom and were known by… Read More

Braunschweig: Druck und Verlag von Friedr. Vieweg and Son, 1916. 1st Edition. FIRST EDITION OF AN IMPORTANT WORK BY EINSTEIN: HIS FIRST PAPER ON THE DERIVATION OF PLANCK'S LAW, HERE INTRODUCING THE THEORY OF THE STIMULATED EMISSION OF ELECTROMAGNETIC RADIATION INTO THE QUANTUM THEORY. "EINSTEIN'S CONCEPT OF STIMULATED EMISSION IS THE OPERATING PRINCIPLE OF THE NOW UBIQUITOUS LASER" (Brandt, Harvest of the Century, 136). In 1900, Max Planck laid the foundation for quantum theory with his publication of Planck's law. Though Einstein commended Planck, in his own "light-quantum hypothesis of 1905, [he, Einstein] postulated that the energy quantization is a property of the radiation field itself and not due to the material resonators [as Planck believed]" (ibid). "Einstein found a similarity between a cavity filled with radiation consisting of quanta and a vessel filled with gas consisting of atoms" (Brandt, Harvest of the Century, 136). Einstein believed that "although either part of Planck's… Read More

Lancaster, PA: American Physical Society, 1948. 1st Edition. FIRST EDITION, FULL VOLUME in PRISTINE CONDITION, OF FEYNMAN'S NOBEL PRIZE WINNING PATH-INTEGRAL FORMALISM, A "REFORMATION OF QUANTUM MECHANICS ITSELF" (American National Biography). Feynman's path-integral formulation of quantum mechanics lead physicists out of the morass of endless calculations and provided them with the simplest, most elegant, most powerful - to say nothing of the most revolutionary - method for solving the fundamental equations of quantum mechanics. Feynman's "path-integral formulation of quantum mechanics is a description of quantum theory that generalizes the action principle of classical mechanics. It replaces the classical notion of a single, unique trajectory for a quantum particle or system" with the idea that the evolution of a quantum system is determined as a sum over - or integration of -- all the possible trajectories that would take that system from the initial to the final state of its dynamical evolution… Read More