First edition. New York: American Telephoen and Telegraph Company, 1949. The first comprehensive report on the transistor; one of the most important inventions of the 20th Century. The invention of the transistor was first announced in three short letters by Bardeen, Brattain, Shockley, and Pearson, in The Physical Review (July... More
Item #2419

London: Taylor & Francis, 1924. First edition of this celebrated paper. Its idea of modeling atomic behaviour under incident electromagnetic radiation using ‘virtual oscillators’ led Born and Heisenberg to explore mathematics that strongly inspired the subsequent development of matrix mechanics. The most striking feature of this remarkable paper, “The Quantum... More
Item #3514

All first editions. Copenhagen: Bianco Luno, 1918-1922. A fine set of this major work: It was in this fundamental paper that Bohr first gave a clear formulation of, and fully utilized, his 'correspondence principle'. Besides his derivation of the Balmer formula (1913), this is by many considered to be Bohr's... More
Item #2257

Copenhagen: IIe Congrès International de la Lumière, 1932. First edition of this famous lecture, which marks Bohr’s first detailed attempt to apply concepts arising from quantum mechanics (particularly complementarity) to areas outside physics. “Here, for the first time, Bohr raised a question that was to preoccupy him, off and on... More
Item #3792

First edition. [London: Harrison and Sons], 1910. Presentation offprint, inscribed in Bohr’s hand to the chemist Einar Biilmann, of the ‘Second Royal Society Paper’ – what Bohr “learned by working in this field may have been a help to him when, more than a quarter of a century later, he... More
Item #3505

First edition. [London: Taylor & Francis], 1915. Author’s presentation offprint, inscribed by Bohr to Prof. Biilmann, of this seminal paper in which Bohr introduced the concept of ‘stationary state’. Soon after the completion of Bohr’s great trilogy on atomic constitution had appeared in November 1913, Moseley began to carry out... More
Item #3301

[Edinburgh: R & R Clark, April 14, 1928. First edition, extremely rare offprint issue, 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... More
Item #3779

Paris: Gauthier-Villars, 1926; 1928. First edition of these expanded presentations of the ideas in de Broglie’s epoch-making doctoral thesis on the quantum theory, which, Einstein said, “lifted a corner of the great veil” (Isaacson, Einstein: His Life and Universe, p. 327). In that work he developed the startling and revolutionary... More
Item #4527

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