Lancaster, PA., and New York: American Physical Society, 1948; 1949; 1951. First edition, journal issues, documenting the invention of the transistor, “which has been called ‘the most important invention of the 20th Century.’ Developed from semiconductor material, the transistor was the first device that could both amplify an electrical signal... More
Item #4566

Paris: Gauthier-Villars, 1896. First edition, in original printed wrappers, of the discovery of radioactivity. The Nobel Prize in Physics 1903 was shared between Becquerel, “in recognition of the extraordinary services he has rendered by his discovery of spontaneous radioactivity,” and Marie and Pierre Curie, “in recognition of the extraordinary services... More
Item #3578

First editions. London: Taylor & Francis, 1913. Extremely rare author’s presentation offprints of his great trilogy, which constitutes the birth of modern atomic physics. “Bohr’s three-part paper postulated the existence of stationary states of an atomic system whose behavior could be described using classical mechanics, while the transition of the... More
Item #3293

London: The Royal Society, 1909. First edition, offprint issue, author’s inscribed presentation copy, of Bohr’s first published scientific paper. “His first research project, a precision measurement of the surface tension of water by the observation of a regularly vibrating jet, was completed in 1906, when he was still a student... More
Item #4432

First edition, offprint issue. Leipzig: Johann Ambrosius Barth, 1923. In this article "Bohr discussed in greater detail than ever before the problem of the complex structure of spectral linesand the anomalous Zeeman effects. He argued there in connection with the case of doublet spectra that 'we must be prepared for... More
Item #2189

First editions, author's presentation offprints, inscribed. Copenhagen: Bianco Lunos, 1918-1922. A rare complete set of his major work in the scarce presentation-offprint issue; with ‘Separate Copy’ printed on the front wrappers. Inscribed by Bohr to Austrian physicist Egon von Schweidler (1873-1948) on the front wrapper of the first part. It... More
Item #3545

First edition. London: Macmillan, 1928. A fine copy in original wrappers of this fundamental paper introducing Bohr’s statement of his ‘complementarity’ principle, the basis of what became known as the ‘Copenhagen interpretation’ of quantum mechanics. “From the epistemological point of view, the discovery of the new type of logical relationship... More
Item #3024

Cambridge: University Press, 1913. First edition, journal issue, of this epoch-making paper, which introduced “Bragg’s law” of X-ray crystallography. “The importance of this work cannot be overstated, for it heralded a revolution in the scientific understanding of crystals and their atomic arrangements. This discovery led to many of the most... More
Item #4549

First edition. Charkow: Technischer Staatsverlag, 1933. Extremely rare offprint of this seminal paper which, in the hands of Richard Feynman, gave birth to the path-integral formulation of quantum mechanics and Feynman integrals. In his Nobel Lecture, Feynman described how he discovered a way to quantize a classical theory given by... More
Item #2920

London: Harrison & Sons for the Royal Society, 1930. First edition in original printed wrappers of Dirac’s prediction of anti-matter – although he did not accept it as such until a year later (see below) – and the advent of the dynamical view of the vacuum which was fundamental to... More
Item #3519

Braunschweig: Vieweg & Sohn, 1914. First edition, extremely rare author’s presentation offprint (with ‘Überreicht vom Verfasser’ (Presented by the Author) printed on front wrapper), and the copy of Einstein’s son Hans Albert, of this crucial transitional paper in which Einstein uses the light quantum hypothesis to give new derivations of... More
Item #4036

Berlin: Akademie der Wissenschaften, 1925. First edition, extremely rare author’s presentation offprint (not to be confused with the much more common trade offprint – see below), and the copy of Einstein’s son Hans Albert, of Einstein’s first original paper on unified field theory, and the first to use the term... More
Item #4035

First edition. Berlin: Julius Springer, 1928. A fine copy, from the library of Niels Bohr, of Fermi’s statistical approach to the determination of atomic structure. The association is particularly appropriate since Bohr had inaugurated the quantum-theoretical approach to atomic structure in 1913. Fermi’s approach was developed independently and simultaneously by... More
Item #3540