Search Results: Titles starting with G from Atticus Rare Books

London: Macmillan and Co, 1948. 1st Edition. BOUND FIRST EDITION OF THREE SIGNIFICANT PAPERS: (1) GABOR PAPER: Gabor's initial announcement of the "invention and development of the holographic method"; at that time, he called his new technology an ‘electron interference microscope' (Nobel Prize; Gabor, Nature, 161, 1948, p. 778). "The first public indication of Gabor's success came with a preliminary note [this paper] to Nature [in 1948]. The following year he wrote a more complete theoretical treatment [which we offer separately] in which he introduced the word ‘hologram' and indicated possible applications in light optics. Among these was the ability, using the same method, to record the data associated with 3-D objects in one interference object" (Dictionary of Scientific Biography, Sup., 17, 325). (2) BERRIMAN'S PAPER: First presentation of a "photographic emulsion which can record the track of any charged particle, regardless of its specific ionization, was achieved by [R. W.] Berriman… Read More

New Haven: Converse, 1831. 1st Edition. Gideon Mantell (1790-1852) was an English obstetrician, geologist and paleontologist best known for his discovery of the first dinosaur ever to be described properly -- a momentous event" (DSB, 87). In "The Geological Age of Reptiles," Mantell is responding to a paper by Cuvier postulating a four-stage sequence of life on earth, the age of reptiles being first. In it, Mantell writes "The earth was people by oviparous quadrupeds of a most appalling magnitude, and reptiles were the ‘Lords of the Creation,' before the existence of the human race." ALSO includes Samuel Guthrie's landmark paper on the discovery of Chloroform and Nicholas Hentz's seminal work on spiders which formed "the basis of the study of American arachnology.". CONDITION & DETAILS: New Haven: Converse. Complete volume. 8vo. (8.5 x 5.5 inches, 213 x 138mm). 3 unrelated plates. Bound in black buckram. Ex-libris with marks at spine neatly blacked. Small ex-libris stamps on the first few… Read More

Philadelphia: Geore W. Childs, 1863. SECOND AMERICAN EDITION, published in the same year as the first, OF LYELL'S CASE FOR HUMAN ANTIQUITY AND THE "WORK IN WHICH HE ALSO ANNOUNCED HIS ACCEPTANCE OF DARWIN'S THEORY OF EVOLUTION as "the best explanation yet offered of the connection between man and those animals which have flourished successively on the earth" (Norman, History of Science). While Lyell never fully accepted natural selection (in its entirety) as the force behind evolution, he still was one the first scientists of note to support Darwin's The Origin of Species. While slow to accept evolutionary theory and quite skeptical of human origins, after years of collecting and gathering evidence including fossil remains and historical artifacts, Lyell reversed his earlier beliefs and this volume is his presentation of those modifications and reversals. His commentary includes specific ideas of species and race, the age of the human race, the existence of ice ages, and of course Darwin's theory… Read More

Lancaster: American Physical Society, 1955. 1st Edition. FIRST EDITION IN ORIGINAL WRAPS OF "THE FIRST REAL SEMINAL WORK ON THE SUBJECT" OF WORMHOLES (Ciufolini, General Relativity, 39). Wheeler's 1955 paper depicts the first diagram of a wormhole - the first diagram of a tunnel connecting one opening in one region of space to another opening in another region -- to appear in the literature of physics. The "first serious paper on wormholes was the 1935 paper by Einstein and Rosen. In this paper the authors used a term, ‘bridge,' for the description of the hypothetical objects" which Wheeler would later call ‘wormholes' (ibid). In this 1955 paper, Wheeler discusses wormholes as topological entities called ‘geons' -- short for ‘gravitational-electromagnetic entity'. He presents a geon a gravitational or electromagnetic wave bound together in a confined area "by the gravitational attraction of its own field energy" (Wikipedia). Today, "wormholes are generally understood as comparatively… Read More

First edition in original wraps of an important work in the formation of our modern cosmological paradigm. Yakov Zeldovich's work was noted to be of import to the February 2016 announcement of the detection of gravitational waves - ripples in the fabric of spacetime - that were first predicted by Einstein's theory of general relativity over 100 years ago. Russian scientists, specifically Zeldovich, contributed to the advances ("We Proved Einstein Right," RT, 12 February 2016; Graham, "Gravitational Waves Detected", Young Herald, 15 February 2016. Confirmation of Einstein's discovery is considered the most important scientific discovery in decades. For this 1982 paper, the authors began with a question: "Can we find observational evidence which can be used to discriminate between various theories of the formation of galaxies?" (Einasto, Yakov Zeldovich and the Cosmic Web Paradigm, IAU Symposium 308, 2015). As Einasto later wrote "if there exist some regularities in the large-scale distribution of… Read More

London: Macmillan, 1960. 1st Edition. FIRST EDITION, full volume, OF A "SEMINAL" HERMANN BONDI PAPER PRESENTING "A NEW APPROACH TO THE STUDY OF GRAVITATIONAL WAVES IN EINSTEIN'S THEORY OF GENERAL RELATIVITY" (Mädler, Bondi-Sachs Formalism, 2). Bondi's new approach was based upon the outgoing null rays along which the waves traveled. In 1957 Bondi firmly established the physical reality of gravitational waves. [We offer this paper separately]. Gravitational waves, or ripples in the fabric of spacetime, were first predicted by Einstein's 1916 general theory of relativity. While Bondi's paper established their physical reality, two papers from the early 1960s - the one offered here and another that we offer separately-- put "their physical properties such as energy and momentum flux on a rigorous mathematical footing" that had been lacking (Denef, Science, Feb. 2016). In February 2016, the September 2015 detection of gravitational waves - waves first predicted by Einstein over a hundred years ago -… Read More

London: Royal Astronomical Society, 1969. 1st Edition. FIRST EDITION, RARE OFFPRINT OF BONDI ON GRAVITATIONAL BOUNCE IN GENERAL RELATIVITY. Hermann Bondi discusses the adiabatic collapse solutions of uniform density spheres under differing assumptions regarding density and central pressure. In discussing the problem of collapse and bounce, Bondi made two assumptions: "first, that the motion is isotropic or shear-free; and second, that the density is uniform" (Durgapal, On Collapse of Uniform Density Sphere with Pressure, JMP, 2010, 143). Bondi examined the radial motion of uniform spheres in general relativity, concluding that in certain cases the system would "bounce," i.e., reverse its radial motion. In 1957 and in a paper we offer separately, Hermann Bondi demonstrated that gravitation waves indeed carry energy, and furthermore that in order to carry energy (and momentum), gravitational waves must be nonlinear. Gravitational waves, or ripples in the fabric of spacetime, were first predicted by… Read More

New York: American Physical Society, 1963. 1st Edition. FIRST EDITION OF KERR'S LANDMARK 1963 PAPER DESCRIBING THE MATHEMATICS OF ROATATING BLACK HOLES, A WORK THAT EXACTLY SOLVED EINSTEIN'S EQUATIONS OF GENERAL RELATIVITY. Not infrequently, Kerr's achievement is described without hyperbole as the most important exact solution to any equations in physics. "In 2022, it was mathematically demonstrated that the equilibrium found by Kerr was stable and thus black holes—which were the solution to Einstein's equation of 1915—were stable" (Wikipedia). As said, researchers finally proved Kerr's black holes stable in 2022. This meant, essentially, that if shaken, they settle back into a form like the one they began with. The opposite situation — a mathematical instability — would not have proved Kerr wrong, but it "would have posed a deep conundrum to theoretical physicists and would have suggested the need to modify, at some fundamental level, Einstein's theory of gravitation" (Quanta; T. Damour,… Read More

London: The Royal Society, 1934. 1st Edition. FIRST EDITION IN ORIGINAL WRAPS OF THE LITTLEWOOD-RICHARDSON RULE. Offprints are prized because they are separately printed by journals and frequently issued in small quantities intended only for the author's use and distribution to colleagues. "In mathematics, the Littlewood-Richardson rule is a combinatorial description of the coefficients that arise when decomposing a product of two Schur functions as a linear combination of other Schur functions. These coefficients are natural numbers, which the Littlewood-Richardson rule describes as counting certain skew tableaux" (Wikipedia). "Dudley Ernest Littlewood was a British mathematician known for his work in group representation theory. He worked on invariant theory and group representation theory, especially of the symmetric group, often in collaboration with Archibald Read Richardson of Swansea. They introduced the immanant of a matrix, studied Schur functions and developed the… Read More

1950. 1st Edition. FIRST EDITION OFFPRINT, PRESENTATION COPY, OF A "MASTERLY ACCOUNT" OF GUERICKE'S SULPHUR GLOBE (Cohen, Guericke and Dufay, 207). Though some still argue that Guericke's sulphur globe was the first electrical machine, Heathcote makes clear that Guericke's experiments with the globe had no electrical significance for Guericke himself. Collectors prize offprints because they are separately printed by journals and frequently issued in small quantities intended only for the author's use and distribution to colleagues. At the head of the first page appears: "Dr. J. W. Abrams, With the Author's Compliments" (see photo). J. W. Abrams was an astrophysicist, an operational researcher, a scientific adviser, and an historian of Science. Abrams was situated at the Supreme Headquarters of the Allied Powers in Europe during World War II and from there, conducted extensive military and scientific study. The generation process for the first electrostatic generators was friction and they were… Read More

Lancaster: American Institute of Physics, 1936. 1st Edition. FIRST EDITION IN ORIGINAL WRAPS OF THE IMPORTANT ESTABLISHMENT OF THE FIRST NEAR PRECISION VALUE FOR THE NUCLEAR MAGNETIC MOMENT. To establish the sign of nuclear moments determined by non-adiabatic transition, Rabi and his team determined the magnetic moment of the deuteron by sending through it a beam of neutral deuterium atoms from a Wood discharge tube. In their own words: "The magnitudes of the nuclear moments of the proton and the deuteron are remeasured by the method of atomic beams. The new experimental arrangement is such that the evaluation of the results does not require any information with regard to the velocity distribution of the atoms in the beam. Detection is made objective by the use of a Stern-Pirani detector" (Kellogg, Rabi, and Zacharias, Phys Rev 50, 472). Rabi and his team "reported the proton's magnetic moment to be in the range +2.70 +3.00 nuclear magnetons, and the deuteron's magnetic moment as between +.82 and… Read More