[Leyden]: in bibliopolio Commeliniano sumptibus viduae Joannis Comelini, 1620. First edition, extremely rare, of one of the earliest modern works on atomism. “Gorlaeus is counted among the founders of modern atomism, which he proposed as an alternative to Aristotelian matter theory. Because of his notion of atomic compounds, he is..... More
Item #4573

Berlin: Walter de Gruyter und Co., 1939 [1942, 1944]. First edition, the true offprint issues, i.e., in orange wrappers, of the three fundamental papers on nuclear fission which eventually lead to the creation of the atom bomb. “…experiments conducted in 1938 at Berlin by Hahn and Strassman [sic] were reported..... More
Item #5050

London: Printed by T. and J.W. Pasham, in Black-Friars, and sold by the booksellers, in London and Westminster, 1763. First edition, extremely rare, of Harrison’s announcement of his invention and testing of his first accurate chronometer, the famous ‘sea-watch’ later called H4, which solved the problem of determining longitude at..... More
Item #4994

Paris: J. Anisson, 1694. First edition, rare, of Hartsoeker's first and most important work, in which he reviewed the principles of optics as far as they were known by the end of the 17th century. In addition to the physics of light and the physiology of vision, the book also..... More
Item #4518

[London: Macmillan, 1974]. First edition, extremely rare offprint issue, and Hawking’s own file copy, of his most important article, predicting that black holes emit radiation, now known as ‘Hawking radiation’. This would cause relatively low mass black holes (less than 1012 kg) to ‘evaporate’ completely in a time less than..... More
Item #5076

[N.p. N.p., 1943-44]. Historic autograph letter from Werner Heisenberg (1901-76), the inventor of quantum mechanics and author of the famous uncertainty principle, to his fellow physicist and sometime collaborator Hendrik Anthony Kramers (1894-1952), discussing Heisenberg’s S-matrix approach to elementary particle physics and urging Kramers to collaborate with him on a...... More
Item #5304

Berlin: Julius Springer, 1928. First edition, journal issue in original printed wrappers, of Heisenberg’s solution of the problem of ferromagnetism, and a remarkable association copy linking two of the greatest figures in twentieth-century physics. Bohr and Heisenberg are also linked by the subject matter of the present work. In his..... More
Item #3526

Berlin: Akademie der Wissenschaften, 1882-1883. First edition, extremely rare author’s presentation offprints, of all three parts of one of the founding paper of chemical thermodynamics, along with Josiah Willard Gibbs’s 1876 paper ‘On the Equilibrium of Heterogeneous Substances.’ In these papers, Helmholtz introduced the concept of ‘free energy’ and proved..... More
Item #5192

Berlin: Georg Reimer, 1847. First edition, rare, of “the first comprehensive statement of the first law of thermodynamics: that all modes of energy, heat, light, electricity, and all chemical phenomena, are capable of transformation from one to the other but are indestructible and cannot be created” (PMM). “On the basis..... More
Item #4842

Philadelphia: Printed by James Kay, Jun. & Brothers, 1839. First edition, author’s presentation offprint, of the third and most important part of Henry’s Contributions to Electricity and Magnetism. Following on from his discovery of electromagnetic self-induction in 1832, in the present paper Henry extends his results on ‘galvanic’ electricity (current..... More
Item #4282

Berlin: Verlag Öffentliches Leben, 1935. First edition, very rare offprint issue, of Hermann’s doctoral thesis. “In 1935 Hermann published an argument demonstrating an apparent flaw in John von Neumann’s 1932 proof which was widely claimed to show that a hidden variable theory of quantum mechanics was impossible. Hermann’s result went..... More
Item #5044

London: Smith, Elder & Co., 1847. First edition, inscribed presentation copy, of Herschel’s greatest astronomical work, inscribed to the Captain of the ship that brought Herschel and his family back from South Africa. This is a monumental survey of the stars of the southern hemisphere, a complement to his father’s..... More
Item #5354

Berlin: Julius Springer, 1923. First edition, the extremely rare author’s presentation offprint issue, of the second major paper in the development of the 'Hilbert programme.' Based upon a lecture given at Leipzig in September 1923, it is the sequel to Hilbert's Neubegründung der Mathematik (1922), in which Hilbert had put forward his proposal..... More
Item #4475