Search Results: Titles starting with Q from The Manhattan Rare Book Company

London: Taylor and Francis. 1st Edition. Soft cover. Very Good. FIRST EDITION of Bohr, Kramers, and Clarke's influential paper that "contained drastic theoretical proposals concerning the interaction of light and matter." Printed simultaneously in German in Zeitschrift fur Physik. "After Kramers had succeeded in extending the scope of the correspondence argument to the theory of optical dispersion - thus rounding off a treatment of the interaction of atomic systems with radiation that accounted for all emission, absorption, and scattering processes - Bohr ventured to propose a systematic formulation of the whole theory, in which what he called the virtual character of the classical model was emphasized. In this he was aided by Kramers and a young American visitor, J. C. Slater, and the new theory was published in 1924 under the authorship of all three. The most striking feature of this remarkable paper, 'The Quantum Theory of Radiation,' was the renunciation of the… Read More

Venice: Venturino Ruffinelli, 1546. First edition. vellum. Very Good. FIRST EDITION OF TARTAGLIA'S MOST IMPORTANT CONTRIBUTION TO MATHEMATICS, INCLUDING HIS RULE FOR SOLVING CUBIC EQUATIONS. "The 'mathematical practitioners' of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries seem to be acquiring an important role in histories which deal with the origins of the Scientific Revolution... Those who are fascinated by questions of origins in the history of science and technology find themselves driven more and more to investigate the sudden appearance, as it still seems, of this relatively large and active group. Among the first generation of these practitioners, few made a greater mark than Niccoló Tartaglia, whose works were translated into all the major European tongues, and whose influence in applied mathematics continued perceptibly for more than a century" (A.G. Keller, "Mathematics at Work: Niccoló Tartaglia, Quesiti et Inventioni Diverse"). Tartaglia's Quesiti, includes, without exaggeration, what… Read More

Lancaster, PA and New York, NY: American Inst. 1st Edition. Soft cover. Fine. FIRST EDITION in original wrappers of Lee and Yang's groundbreaking proposal to determine the nature of parity in weak interactions; essential to the modern understanding of elementary particles. "Following a suggestion made by the experimenter Martin Block, who was his room-mate at a conference in 1956 (at Rochester, in New York), Richard Feynman made the heretical proposal to the meeting that the theta and tau are different states of the same particle, which itself has no definite parity, and that parity is not always conserved. The idea was quickly taken up by Chen Ning Yang and Tsung Dao Lee, who showed that parity is not conserved in the weak interaction; their theory was immediately tested and proved correct by Chien Shiung Wu, and Yang and Lee received the Nobel Prize for their work in 1957- one of the quickest such awards ever made" (Gribbin, Q is for Quantum). "Although physicists still did not… Read More