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

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

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

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 the possibility that the..... More
Item #2189

Copenhagen: Bianco Lunos, 1918-22. First edition, very rare presentation offprints (with ‘Separate Copy’ printed on the front wrappers), inscribed by Bohr to Kasimir Fajans, and from the collection of The Garden Ltd., of this fundamental work in which Bohr first gave a clear formulation of, and fully utilized, his ‘correspondence..... More
Item #4920

[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

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

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

London: Harrison and Sons, 1909. A fine copy, in the original wrappers, of the famous Geiger-Marsden experiment (or gold foil experiment) which demonstrated for the first time the existence of the atomic nucleus, leading to the downfall of Thomson’s plum-pudding model of the atom, and the development of the Rutherford..... More
Item #3587

[Leyden]: in bibliopolio Commeliniano sumptibus viduae Joannis Comelini, 1620. First edition, extremely rare, of one of the earliest modern works on atomism. “Gorlaeus is counted among the founders of modern atomism, which he proposed as an alternative to Aristotelian matter theory. Because of his notion of atomic compounds, he is..... More
Item #4573