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

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 greatest contribution to..... 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

[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 showed that..... More
Item #3505

[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 experiments on..... 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

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 the principle..... 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

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 Llewellyn Thomas..... More
Item #3540

Vancouver: [np], 1975. A detailed draft for a talk given to the Canadian Association of Physics Students, in Vancouver, on the contemporary state of subatomic particle physics, its current difficulties and possible future developments. Although a ‘popular’ talk, it is pitched at a high level, appropriate to postgraduate students in physics..... More
Item #4859

New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 1985. First edition, first printing, and a fine copy in a bright dust jacket, signed by Feynman and from the library of a second Nobel Prize winner, Edwin P. McMillan. Signed copies of this first printing are rare: Feynman was notorious for refusing..... More
Item #4459