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

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: 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 that complementarity..... More
Item #3024

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

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

Leipzig: Johann Ambrosius Barth, 1905. First Edition, very rare author’s presentation offprint, of Einstein’s paper on light quanta, for which (along with his 1912 paper on the photo-electric equation) he was awarded the 1921 Nobel Prize for physics. Completed in March of 1905 (Einstein’s annus mirabilis), ‘On a heuristic point..... More
Item #4983

Berlin: Springer, 1926. First edition of Gordon’s account of the ‘Klein-Gordon equation’ (‘KG equation’ in what follows), the first attempt at unifying wave mechanics with special relativity. The KG equation was discovered by several authors independently, the first being the Swedish physicist Oskar Klein, although the equation appeared only incidentally..... More
Item #4497

Berlin: Walter de Gruyter und Co., 1939 [1942, 1944]. First edition, offprint issues, 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 to Lise Meitner, an Austrian scientist..... More
Item #4152

Berlin: Springer, 1943; 1943; 1944. First edition of Heisenberg’s S-matrix approach to the study of elementary particles, complete in three parts (a fourth part was written but not published). Although S-matrix theory was abandoned after the War due to the success of quantum electrodynamics and quantum chromodynamics, it again became..... More
Item #3530

Berlin: Julius Springer, 1928. A remarkable association copy, from the library of Niels Bohr, of Heisenberg’s solution of the problem of ferromagnetism. Bohr and Heisenberg are also linked by the subject matter of the present work. In his doctoral thesis Studier over Metallernes Elektrontheori (1911), Bohr proved what was later..... More
Item #3526

New York: The American Physical Society, 1964. First editions of the first published papers to propose the existence of what are now known as the ‘Higgs mechanism’ and the ‘Higgs boson’, “the key element of the electroweak theory that forms part of the Standard Model of particle physics, and of..... More
Item #4550