Search Results: Titles starting with N from Atticus Rare Books

National Academy of Sciences, 1955. 1st Edition. FIRST EDITION IN ORIGINAL WRAPS & HOUSED IN A CUSTOM PAMPHLET CASE of the groundbreaking theoretical paper by Niels K. Jerne describing his theory of antibody formulation. This article, which has 1,075 citations, revolutionized the theory of monoclonal antibodies and Jerne shared the 1984 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine "for theories concerning the specificity in development and control of the immune system." the Nobel Prize Committee awarded Jerne his prize, they did so noting that his "view of the nature of the immune system constitutes the basis for modern immunology" (Nobel Prize Committee) "Jerne's "natural-selection theory regarding antibody formation breaks with old views on the immune response and is a starting point of modern cellular immunology" (Nobel Prize Press Release). Jerne "proposed that a broad range of specificities of antibodies were released into the blood spontaneously and that antibodies were subject to a replicative… Read More

London, New Bond-Street: R. Faulder, 1803. AN INFLUENTIAL CONTRIBUTION TO BIOLOGICAL THOUGHT & A PARTICULARLY WELL-WRITTEN CASE FOR INTELLIGENT DESIGN & BY WILLIAM PALEY. We offer the expanded fourth edition. Natural Theology, first published in 1802, is a work of Christian apologetics and religious philosophy by William Paley (1743-1805), an English clergyman. "The book expounds his arguments from natural theology, making a teleological argument for the existence of God, notably beginning with the watchmaker analogy" (Wikipedia). "In this book, Paley laid out a full exposition of natural theology, the belief that the nature of God could be understood by reference to His creation, the natural world" (UCMP Berkeley). "The fact that Paley's 1802 book was called Natural Theology is no doubt part of why natural theology as a whole is sometimes equated with the a posteriori investigations of nature for the purposes of supporting religious theses. In the analogy that made Paley's argument famous, the… Read More

London: Macmillan, 1934. 1st Edition. FIRST EDITION IN ORIGINAL WRAPS of the first calculation of what is now called the 'neutrino cross section;' more specifically, Bethe and Peierl's paper presents the first calculation of a measure of the probability of a collision. Together, they used general principles to relate the chance of beta decay to the probability of a neutrino interacting with matter" (Close, Neutrino). Neutrinos, a product of several nuclear reactions (including nuclear fusion and radioactive decay) are elementary subatomic particles with no electric charge, very little mass and .5 unit of spin. The study of neutrino interaction physics played an important role in ascertaining the validity of the theories of weak interactions and electroweak interaction. All totaled, "the prediction, discovery and understanding of the neutrino would take scientists almost 100 years. It was clear from the start that discovering the neutrino would not be easy. Fermi proposed his theory of beta decay in… Read More

Lancaster: American Institute of Physics, 1939. 1st Edition. FIRST EDITION IN ORIGINAL WRAPS of an important experiment in early fission research that was also led directly to Albert Einstein's famous letter to President Roosevelt urging his understanding of the potential lethality of chain fission reactions and prompting him to start the Manhattan Project. It had already been determined that there existed an abundant emission of neutrons from uranium under the action of slow neutrons. While at Columbia, Szilard, Fermi, and Anderson sought to study the production and absorption of neutrons in uranium - working specifically in this paper to "ascertain whether and to what extent the number of neutrons emitted exceeds the number absorbed" (Szilard et al, Physical Review 56, August 1, 1939, 284). They found that the question could be "investigated by placing a photo-neutron source in the center of a large water tank and comparing, with and without uranium in the water, the number of thermal neutrons… Read More

Lancaster: American Physical Society, 1955. 1st Edition. One of the major issues in relation to Einstein's relativity was raised in 1933 by Dayton Clarence Miller and his ‘ether drift experiment'. In one of the most interesting and problematic "reviews of special relativity, [Miller] questioned Michelson and Morley's ‘null result'. According to [Miller], a systematic periodic term would alter the interferometer data, regardless of any statistical error, fluctuations or other mechanical effects" (Shankland, 1955). Miller himself was a vociferous opponent of Einstein's relativity - something his experiment seemed to back up". Miller's results gnawed at the scientific community, particularly given that "For nearly thirty years the results of the Michelson-Morley experiment obtained by Dayton C. Miller on Mount Wilson have stood at variance with all other trials of this experiment" (Shankland 1955). "Shankland believed that the accepted direct explanation for the Michelson-Morley experiment is… Read More

London: Macmillan and Co, 1909. 1st Edition. BOUND FIRST EDITION OF RARE DESCRIPTION OF LUDGATE'S ANALYTICAL ENGINE; FULL VOLUME WITH ORIGINAL WRAPS BOUND IN. In 1909, working entirely on his own and only as a ‘hobbyist', completely unaware of Charles Babbage's designs, Dublin accountant P. E. Ludgate (1883-1922) designed an Analytical Engine — an original universal calculating machine. However there are only two sources of information regarding Ludgate's machine — his initial brief description in the April 1909 Scientific Proceedings of the Royal Dublin Society and the description offered here by C. V. Boys in the July 1909 issue of Nature. Charles Babbage (1791-1871) designed two classes of engine, Difference Engines which are, essentially, strictly calculators, and Analytical Engines — far more than calculators, they marked the progression from the mechanized arithmetic of calculation to full fledged computation. Though he never lived to see the Analytical Engine he designed built,… Read More

London: Macmillan, 1965. 1st Edition. FIRST EDITION (full volume) OF JOHN TUZO WILSON'S 1965 GROUNDBREAKING INTRODUCTION OF THE CONCEPT OF THE TRANSFORM FAULT, THE PAPER THAT FOUNDED PLATE TECTONICS" (Dewey, Marking 50 Years of the Wilson Cycle, Geoscience Canada, 43, 2016, 283). "Whereas previous theories of continental drift had conceived of plates as either moving closer together (convergent plates) or further apart (divergent), Wilson asserted that a third kind of movement existed whereby plates slide past each other. This theory became one of the bases for plate tectonics, which revolutionized the geophysical sciences" (Encyclopedia Britannica). [Note that we offer other important Wilson papers separately]. Though Wilson wrote other papers of interest in 1962 and 1963, prior to 1965, he was "a staunch anti-drifter", meaning he didn't believe in continental drift. In 1965, Wilson began to tie "together many threads to create a cohesive paradigm that embraced continental drift, sea-floor… Read More

London: Harrison & Sons, 1878. 1st Edition. FIRST EDITION & PRINTING OF JOULE'S FINAL DETERMINATION OF THE MECHANICAL EQUIVALENT OF HEAT. This was the "last experimental research of any magnitude that Joule undertook" (Reynolds, Memoir of James Prescott Joule, 165). Crookes information appears below. Volume includes Parts I & II of the Phil Trans bound together and 70 plates. Inspired by his belief that heat was derived from work, Joule spent a great deal of his life converting mechanical work directly into heat without any electrical steps as he worked to determine the mechanical equivalent of heat. The concept of the mechanical equivalent of heat states "that motion and heat are mutually interchangeable and that in every case, a given amount of work would generate the same amount of heat, provided the work done is totally converted to heat energy" (Wikipedia). In this paper, Joule discusses problems relating to his discovery of the first law of thermodynamics, the principle of the conservation… Read More

Rome: American Institute of Physics, 1972. 1st Edition. BOUND FIRST EDITION OF OSHEROFF, RICHARDSON, & LEE'S NOBEL PRIZE WINNING DISCOVERY OF SUPERFLUIDITY IN HELIUM 3. Superfluidity is one "of the greatest physics discoveries in the first half of the 20th century" (Donnelly, The Discovery of Superfluidity, Physics Today, July 1995, 30). The discovery of superfluidity in helium 3 was very unexpected - so unexpected that the paper submitted by Osheroff et al. was initially rejected by Physical Review Letters; it simply wasn't believed. This volume also contains Leggett's very significant paper on the superfluidity of helium-3 (see below). Leggett's paper was a "particularly importation contribution...in the interpretation of the discovery [by Osheroff et al]" (Nobel Prize Portal). Leggett also received the Nobel Prize for his pioneering work on superfluids. "Superfluidity is a condition observed in liquid helium when it is chilled very close to absolute zero (about minus 459.67 degrees Fahrenheit"… Read More

New Haven: Converse, 1832. 1st Edition. FIRST EDITION OF A LANDMARK PAPER present in both the famous Dr. Haskell F. Norman Library and the Landmarks of Science and Medicine from the Library of Andras Gedeon, both collections handled by Christie's. In this paper, Guthrie presents one of three independent discoveries of Chloroform that were, ironically, all discovered at about the same time. Guthrie's discovery was particularly important as it was literally first and because the method he employed it his was the closest to the modern method. Samuel Guthrie was a 19th century physician and chemist who discovered the anaesthetic chloroform (tri-chloromethane) in 1831, by distilling chloride of lime with alcohol in a copper barrel, using it as a mild anesthetic in amputation surgeries. "When first made, it was known as "Guthrie's Sweet Whiskey." In Guthrie's communication [paper offered here] it will be seen that he was unaware that his preparation was a new substance. His purpose was to find an… Read More

1877. 1st Edition. FIRST EDITION OF A PAPER BY CHARLES SANDERS PEIRCE THAT IS WIDELY CONSIDERED "THE FIRST EXPERIMENTAL PSYCHOLOGY WORK IN AMERICA" (Cadwallader, 1974). This 1877 investigation into the nature of color vision made Peirce "the first modern experimental psychologist on the American continent" (The Peirce Edition Project, Vol. 3). Peirce was one of the earliest practitioners of the randomized experiment and in this paper, employs that technique and publishes what was then called a psychophysical experiment on vision and color. Both the Young-Helmholtz color theory and Fechner's law are also discussed. In 1885, Peirce and Joseph Jastrow would publish an experiment using "a shuffled deck of playing cards to randomly determine the presentation order of stimuli used in a pychometric study;" this "possibly the first randomized experiment in social psychology (Handbook of the History of Social Psychology, 161). Peirce was "the founder of American pragmatism," a philosopher, logician,… Read More

Paris: Gauthier-Villars, 1850. 1st Edition. FIRST EDITION OF AN IMPORTANT NERVE EXPERIMENT BY HELMHOLTZ THAT MARKS THE BEGINNING OF THE FIELD OF ‘NEUROPHYSIOLOGY.' Helmholtz "was the first scientist to make precise measurements of nervous action" (Schmidgen, Origins of Psychophysiological Time Experiments, 1). "In 1849, while at Konigsberg, Helmholtz measured the speed at which the signal is carried along a nerve fibre. At that time most people believed that nerve signals passed along nerves immeasurably fast. He used a recently dissected sciatic nerve of a frog and the calf muscle to which it attached. He used a galvanometer as a sensitive timing device, attaching a mirror to the needle to reflect a light beam across the room to a scale which gave much greater sensitivity. "Helmholtz reported transmissions speeds in the range of 24.6 - 38.4 meters per second" (Wikipedia). "Many physiologists had assumed it to be instantaneous, or comparable to the speed of light, but Helmholtz clocked the… Read More

Paris: Mallet-Bachelier, 1855. 1st Edition. Full volume. RARE FIRST PRINTING OF BABBAGE'S REPORT ON SCHEUTZ'S DIFFERENCE CALCULATOR. Babbage thought so highly of Scheutz's engine that in an effort to promote [it], presented a talk on it before the Academie des Sciences. In the talk, Babbage describes the machine's construction and functions using his own system of mechanical notation. His speech was published in the volume offered here the Academie's Comptes rendus" (Hook & Norman Origins of Cyberspace, No. 73). Georg Scheutz [Scheuts] and his son Edvard based their calculator on Babbage's own designs. "After reading a description of the Difference Engine (by Babbage), they designed and built their own version. This machine was smaller and lighter than the engine conceived by Babbage. They used gears and levers that would have been suitable for the mechanism of a clock. In contrast, Babbage used technology that would have been appropriate for a steam engine. Babbage's engine, if completed, would… Read More

Leipzig: Johann Ambrosius Barth, 1885. 1st Edition. FIRST EDITION, FIRST PRINTING OF THE SEMINAL 1885 DISCOVERY OF THE BALMER FORMULA: A MATHEMATICAL RELATIONSHIP BETWEEN THE FREQUENCIES OF ATOMIC SPECTRAL LINES. "Balmer had found a simple but very accurate formula... to compute the frequencies (and wavelengths) of the light for the spectral lines emitted by atomic hydrogen" (Brandt, Harvest of a Century, 93). "As soon as I saw Balmer's formula, the whole thing was immediately clear to me" Bohr told Leon Rosenfeld in an interview. (Heilbron, Historical studies in the theory of atomic structure, p. 265). In atomic physics, the spectral line emissions of the hydrogen atom are known as the Balmer series or lines. The series is calculated using the Balmer formula, the empirical equation discovered by Balmer and first stated in this paper. Balmer's discovery was very influential in Bohr's famous and groundbreaking discovery and description of his model of atomic structure published in 1913. In the… Read More

Paris: Gauthier-Villars, 1891. 1st Edition. FIRST EDITION IN ORIGINAL WRAPS OF THE FIRST ACCURATE BALANCE FOR MEASURING CHEMICALS, the invention of the chain balance. Complete original issue. The history of scales and balances dates back to Ancient Egypt when a simplistic equal-arm balance on a fulcrum was used to compare two masses. The weighing of chemicals required something more exact, however. The chain balance was an ingenious attachment to the ordinary chemical balance. First conceived and patented in 1890 by Louis Marie Victor Serrin a French inventor who, in search of a more accurate way to measure chemicals, employed a light chain. One end of the chain was "attached to one arm of the balance, and the other to a movable arm sliding on the case of the machine. By raising or lowering this arm, the fraction of the chain carried by the balance arm is diminished or increased. In using the device the weighing is made approximately by weights in the usual way, and when nearly in balance the… Read More

ORIGINAL WRAPS, full issue 121 housed in a handsome custom case. FIRST EDITION OF AN IMPORTANT PAPER IN WHICH THE FRENCH PHYSICIST JEAN PERRIN PROVES UNEQUIVOCALLY NOT JUST THAT CATHODE RAYS TRANSPORT CHARGE , BUT THAT "CATHODE RAYS CONSIST OF NEGATIVELY CHARGED MATTER MOVING WITH CONSIDERABLY VELOCITY" (Magee, Source Book in Physics, 580). In late 1895, "a young French graduate student J. Perrin confirmed the corpuscular nature of cathode rays. In order to settle the difference between the opposing views of Goldstein, Hertz, and Lenard on the one hand, and Crookes and Thomson on the other hand, [Perrin in this experiment] collected the cathode rays in a metal cups, which acted as a Faraday cyliner, just before they struck the glass wall, and found that they gave a negative charge, which he measured with an electroscope. To confirm his experiment, Perrin showed that if the cathode rays are deflected by a magnet no charge is detected by the electroscope. He was also successful in carrying out the… Read More

Lancaster: American Institute of Physics, 1950. 1st Edition. BOUND FIRST EDITION IN ORIGINAL WRAPS OF THE TWO PAPERS IN WHICH MARCIA MAYER DEVELOPS A MATHEMATICAL MODEL FOR THE STRUCTURE OF NUCLEAR SHELLS. Mayer "was the first person to investigate the theoretical basis of nuclear pairing," something which plays a critical role in the shell model of the atomic nucleus. Along with J.H.D. Jenson and Eugene Wigner (for their contributions to the theory of the atomic nucleus and nuclear shell structure), Mayer won the 1963 Nobel Prize in Physics for this work. "Mayer was a mathematical physicist with a facility for the matrix manipulations of group theory and quantum mechanics and a chemist's appreciation for the accumulation and analysis of large quantities of physical data" (Dictionary of Scientific Biography). In 1950, there were two major theories of the nucleus: the liquid drop model and the shell model. "The reality of some kind of shell arrangement became clear only in 1948, when Mayer [in this… Read More

Lancaster: American Institute of Physics, 1950. 1st Edition. FIRST EDITION IN ORIGINAL WRAPS OF JAMES RAINWATER'S INFLUENTIAL, NOBEL PRIZE WINNING PAPER ON THE ASYMMETRICAL SHAPES OF CERTAIN ATOMIC NUCLEI. In 1975 the Nobel Prize in Physics was awarded to Aage Bohr, Ben Mottelson, and James Rainwater for "The discovery of the connection between collective motion and particle motion in atomic nuclei and the development of the theory of the structure of the atomic nucleus based on the connection" (Nobel Prize Portal). This is the first paper noted in "Who's Who of Nobel Prize Winners" (Sherby) as the primary work for which Rainwater was awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics. In 1949, Rainwater learned of Marie Mayer's success "in explaining many nuclear phenomena including spins, magnetic moments, isomeric states, etc. on the basis of a single particle model for the separate nucleons in a spherical nucleus" (Rainwater, Phys Rev, 79, 1950, p. 432). He later wrote: Mayer's thoughts [fit] my belief that a… Read More

Lancaster: American Institute of Physics, 1950. 1st Edition. BOUND FIRST EDITION OF THE TWO PAPERS IN WHICH MARCIA MAYER DEVELOPS A MATHEMATICAL MODEL FOR THE STRUCTURE OF NUCLEAR SHELLS. Mayer "was the first person to investigate the theoretical basis of nuclear pairing," something which plays a critical role in the shell model of the atomic nucleus. Along with J.H.D. Jenson and Eugene Wigner (for their contributions to the theory of the atomic nucleus and nuclear shell structure), Mayer won the 1963 Nobel Prize in Physics for this work. "Mayer was a mathematical physicist with a facility for the matrix manipulations of group theory and quantum mechanics and a chemist's appreciation for the accumulation and analysis of large quantities of physical data" (Dictionary of Scientific Biography). In 1950, there were two major theories of the nucleus: the liquid drop model and the shell model. "The reality of some kind of shell arrangement became clear only in 1948, when Mayer [in this paper] brought… Read More

London: Macmillan, 1939. 1st Edition. FIRST EDITION IN ORIGINAL WRAPS of the first solid evidence that neutron multiplication is large enough (3.5) to creat a chain reaction, thus profiding "indirect proof of the neutron multiplication accompanying the fission of uranium nuclei after neutron capture" (Printing and the Mind of Man, 422). Halban, Joliot, and Kowarski reported that several free neutrons are released for each uranium that splits. Their experiments "recognized that under suitable conditions such secondary neutrons might in turn induce fission in other nuclei, setting in motion a chain reaction capable of sustaining itself until the uranium was entirely consumed" (Sikme, Lise Meitner: A Life in Physics, 261). The "experiments raised the prospect that fission might be used to generate immense quantities of energy" (ibid). CONDITION & DETAILS: London: Macmillan. 4to. (10.5 x 7.5 inches; 262 x 188mm). Original paper wraps with very slight remnants of creases within. Clean and bright inside and out.