Paris: L’Imprimerie Royale, 1693. First edition of this superb collection of thirty-one treatises by the leading scientists of seventeenth-century France, almost all of which are published here for the first time. This is one of the earliest important publications of the Académie des Sciences, and one of the most magnificent..... More
Item #4565
London: W. Clowes & Sons, 1846. First separate edition, presentation copy inscribed by Adams, of the discovery of Neptune, “undeniably one of the major scientific events of the nineteenth century” (Lequeux, p. 22). Adams (1819-92) and the French astronomer Urban Le Verrier (1811-77) independently predicted the existence and position of..... More
Item #5419
Paris: David l’ainé [Colophon: De l'imprimerie de Jean-Baptiste Coignard, imprimeur du roi], 1747. First edition of one of d’Alembert’s most important books, widely regarded as the foundation work of the dynamics of rigid bodies. “The precession of the equinoxes had been observed in antiquity by Hipparchus. Newton explained the cause..... More
Item #5297
![Item #4831 Recherches sur le Spectre Solaire. [With:] Spectre normal du soleil. Atlas de six...](https://sophiararebooks.cdn.bibliopolis.com/pictures/4831.jpg?width=320&height=427&fit=bounds&auto=webp&v=1592300987)
Upsalla: W. Schultz, 1868. First edition, a very fine copy in unrestored original printed wrappers, and rare thus, of one of the founding works of spectroscopy in which Ångström demonstrated the presence of hydrogen and a number of other elements in the sun; the atlas contains his great map of..... More
Item #4831
[N.p. N.p., ca. 1780]. A fascinating manual of astronomy, particularly as it relates to the form of the motions of the heavens, dating from the period 1780-1825, probably from the beginning of that range. It is in a single hand (with the exception of one page), though with some variations..... More
Item #5309
London: Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society, 1948. First edition, the extremely rare offprint, of the first published paper to propound the ‘steady-state’ model of the universe, according to which the universe is expanding but unchanging, with no beginning or end, and in which matter is continually being created..... More
Item #4162
The Hague: Adriaan Vlacq, 1655-56. First edition, very rare and a fine copy. “In 1656 French physician, chemist, botanist, and savant Pierre Borel published the first documentary history of the invention of the telescope and microscope in De vero telescopii inventore … in The Hague. Borel’s work also contained Christiaan..... More
Item #5415
Modena: Bartolomeo Soliani, 1653. First edition, exceptionally rare, of the remarkable first publication of the great observational astronomer Gian Domenico Cassini, in which he demonstrated for the first time by observing their parallax that comets are celestial phenomena and not, as Aristotle had claimed, ignited exhalations from the earth (the..... More
Item #5203
London: Abell Jeffes, 1591. Second and best edition of this important Elizabethan work on practical geometry, in which “for the first time, we have indications of an instrument which we may call a reflecting telescope” (King, The History of the Telescope, p. 29). This second edition contains several appendices by Thomas..... More
Item #5131
Venice: Tomasso Baglioni, 1611. First edition, extremely rare, of this important early work on the optics of the telescope and related optical phenomena, and containing the first essentially correct theory of the rainbow to be published. Dominis and Galileo were both teaching mathematics and physics in Padua at the same..... More
Item #5287
Prague: Gottlieb Haase & Sons, 1846. First edition, very rare separately-paginated offprint, of this important complement to Doppler’s epoch-making discovery in 1842 of the principle named after him. The three articles comprising this offprint contain extensions of the Doppler principle, as well as the first suggestion to use photographic and..... More
Item #4936
Lancaster, PA: American Physical Society, 1945-46. First edition, extremely rare offprints, of Einstein & Straus’s introduction of the ‘Swiss-cheese’ model of the universe. “After [a] decade and a half of sometimes intense work on cosmology, Einstein returned to the subject only occasionally in his later years. His most significant later..... More
Item #5054
![Item #5863 Zur allgemeinen Relativitätstheorie [with:] Zur allgemeinen Relativitätstheorie...](https://sophiararebooks.cdn.bibliopolis.com/pictures/5863.jpg?width=320&height=427&fit=bounds&auto=webp&v=1690453687)
Berlin: Königlichen Akademie der Wissenschaften, 1915. First editions, very rare offprint, of the first two of the papers published in November 1915 that document Einstein’s final version of the general theory of relativity. “In the half century and more of Einstein’s work in science, one discovery stands above all as..... More
Item #5863
Evanston, IL: The Library Living Philosophers, 1949. First edition, number 629 of 760 numbered copies signed and dated by Einstein. This important volume contains Einstein’s autobiography, specially written for the book, and itself an important scientific contribution. It also includes a bibliography of his works, twenty-five scientists’ discussions of Einstein’s..... More
Item #5706
London: John Matthews, 1712. The true first edition, extremely rare, of Flamsteed’s catalogue of fixed stars and sextant observations, the foundation of modern observational astronomy; this copy was probably bound for Queen Anne (please see below). Flamsteed’s catalogue was far more extensive and accurate than anything that had gone before..... More
Item #5074
de l’Academie des Sciences de l’URSS, 1937. First edition, very rare offprint, of the explanation of Cherenkov radiation, for which Frank and Tamm shared (with Cherenkov) the Nobel Prize in Physics 1958. “In certain media the speed of light is lower than in a vacuum and particles can travel faster..... More
Item #5969
München: Lentner, [1817]. First edition, journal issue, of the founding work of astrophysics, the discovery of the absorption lines in the solar spectrum; the second plate, which reproduces Fraunhofer’s drawing of these lines (etched by Fraunhofer himself), is the first illustration of the solar spectrum. “In 1802, when describing his..... More
Item #5864
[Altona: Hammerich- und Heineking’schen Buchdruckerey, 1825]. First edition, extremely rare separately-paginated offprint (journal pagination 31-92), inscribed by Fraunhofer to John Herschel, of this work on atmospheric optical phenomena, including haloes and parhelia. “Fraunhofer had carried out experiments in 1825 with diffraction in disordered small gaps and particles, and developed the..... More
Item #5229
Göttingen: Dieterich, 1818. First edition, very rare separately-paginated offprint, preceding the journal appearance in Commentationes Societatis Regiae Scientiarum Gottingensis (vol. 4, pp. 21-48) by two years. “In his first years at Göttingen, Gauss experienced a second upsurge of ideas and publications in various fields of mathematics. Among the latter were several..... More
Item #5312
Lancaster, PA: American Physical Society, 1949. First edition, journal issue, in original printed wrappers, of Gödel’s ‘time-travel paper,’ ‘one of the most important [papers] on relativity since my own original paper appeared’ (Einstein to Morgenstern, 1952). “In the 1920s and 1930s, the Friedmann-Robertson-Walker cosmological models had been introduced as the..... More
Item #5820
[Brookhaven, NY: The American Physical Society], 1983. First edition, very rare offprint, and Hawking’s own file copy, of this famous paper describing the 'no-boundary proposal’ for the origin of the universe. “Stephen sought to understand the whole universe in scientific terms. As he said famously, ‘My goal is simple. It..... More
Item #5075
[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
[1813-1850]. An extraordinary collection of works by Sir John Herschel (1792-1871), the outstanding astronomer and physical scientist of his day, assembled for presentation to his son William James Herschel (not to be confused with John’s father, the astronomer Frederick William). The collection includes offprints of Herschel’s three most important publications..... More
Item #4321
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: Königlichen Akademie der Wissenschaften, 1888. First edition, complete journal issue in original printed wrappers, of one of the two most important papers of Hertz’s on electromagnetic waves, in which he demonstrates for the first time that electromagnetic effects propagate at the speed of light (it was only a month later..... More
Item #5310