Search Results: Titles starting with V from Atticus Rare Books

1968. 1st Edition. FIRST EDITION OF SAKHAROV'S PATHBREAKING THEORY, THE FIRST QUANTIZATION OF SPACE. Full volume with original wraps bound in. In this paper, Sakharov suggests that quantum fluctuations of the vacuum induce the geometry of spacetime. His work gave rise to new research areas in physics, work that continues to this day. Soviet Physics Doklady is published by the American Institute of Physics and is an English translation of the physics sections of the Proceedings of the Academy of Sciences of the USSR. Andrei Dmitrievich Sakharov was a "Russian nuclear physicist, Soviet dissident, an activist for disarmament, peace and human rights" (Sakharov Human Rights Prize, 15 January 2014). In 1968 he sought address a number of physics ‘oddities', particularly that gravity seems to operate among complex aggregates of interacting particles but does not seem to impact interactions between elementary particles. As well, Sakharov wanted" to derive Einstein's general relativity formulas from a more… Read More

New York: Orange Judd, 1868. 1st American Edition. Two volume FIRST AMERICAN EDITION of "ONE OF DARWIN'S MOST INFLUENTIAL AND WIDE-RANGING BOOKS. IT IS ALSO HIS LONGEST AND MOST DETAILED WORK" (Freeman, The Works of Charles Darwin, 879). It is also "the only section of Darwin's big book on the origin of species which was printed in his lifetime and corresponding to its first two intended chapters" (ibid). Darwin's intent was "to provide overwhelming evidence for the ubiquity of variation" (Oxford Dictionary of National Biography). "This work is notable not only for Darwin's prodigious amassing of facts concerning artificial selection of traits to demonstrate an analogy for natural selection. It also advances his hypothesis of pangenesis and gemmules, as the agents of the inheritance of characteristics" (DSB). Darwin's hypothesis of pangenesis, "here expounded for the first time" (Freeman). Was the by "means of which [he] tried to frame an explanation of hereditary resemblance, inheritance of… Read More

Paris: Gauthier-Villars, 1890. 1st Edition. ORIGINAL PAPER WRAPS, FIRST EDITION, OF THE DISCOVERY OF THE BRANLY EFFECT & THE INVENTION OF THE ‘COHERER', THE FIRST WIDELY USED SIGNAL DETECTOR FOR RADIO COMMUNICATION. The paper offered here is housed in a custom pamphlet case. Note that we offer Bose's "iron-mercury-iron coherer paper separately. Though one of the first pioneers in the field of wireless transmission, Branly always denied being one of the fathers of radio communication. Perhaps "more accurately, Branly's discovery of a physical effect [the Branly effect] gave him the opportunity to devise an efficient wave sensor (the coherer) that permitted the invention of radio" (Dilhac, "Edouard Branly, the Coherer, and the Branly Effect," in IEEE Communications Magazine, September 2009, 20). "In June 1890... [Branly was] concentrating on the influence of irradiation on the electrical conductivity of various substances submitted to the light from the spark. Branly had devised a first circuit to… Read More

THREE FIRST EDITIONS IN ORIGINAL WRAPS OF EACH OF MANDELBROT'S SEMINAL PAPERS ON THE MARKETS — the 1963 paper itself, the 1967 followup, and the 1972 correction — all housed in a quarter calf clamshell case. Though best known for his development of fractal geometry, prior to that, Benoit Mandelbrot applied his prodigious skills to economics, finding that prices in financial markets did not follow a Gaussian distribution but rather Lévy stable distributions having theoretically infinite variance. Put another way, Mandelbrot believes that "Wild price swings, business failures, windfall trading profits - these are key phenomena. In all their drama and power, they should matter most to bankers, regulators and investors." And Mandelbrot showed them to be much more common than they would be if market movements followed a standard bell curve. The 20th century saw 48 days in which the Dow Jones Industrial Average swung more than 7 per cent. ‘Normal' statistical modelling predicts such swings should… Read More

Leipzig: Johann Ambrosius Barth, 1829. 1st Edition. FIRST EDITION OF DOBEREINER'S LAW OF TRIADS. In this paper, Johann Wolfgang Dobereiner, a German scientist, was the first to classify elements into groups based on John Dalton's assertions that the atoms of an element have a characteristic mass. In an attempt to classify elements on the basis of Dalton's proposed atomic mass, Dobereiner grouped the elements with similar chemical properties into clusters of three, later termed 'Triads'. The distinctive feature of a triad was the atomic mass of the middle element. When elements were arranged in order of their increasing atomic mass, the atomic mass of the middle element was approximately the arithmetic mean of the other two elements of the triad. For example, "Dobereiner found that some groups of three elements that have similar properties, for example lithium, sodium and potassium, the atomic mass (mass number) for the second element was the average of the first and third element.… Read More

FIRST EDITION of the "Fermi Interaction," -- his seminal quantum mechanical description of the first complete theory of beta decay. "A particularly elegant theory and paper, Fermi's work is regarded as classic and remains highly influential to this day" (Peacock, The Quantum Revolution, 94). "In 1930, Pauli postulated the existence of the neutrino to explain the continuous distribution of energy of the electrons emitted in beta decay. ["Fermi in 1931 jocularly dubbed the new particle the ‘neutrino.'" (ibid.)] Only with the emission of a third particle could momentum and energy be conserved" (Nave). Assuming the existence of the neutrino which Pauli had suggested to preserve the principle of conservation of energy, Fermi treated the ejection of electrons and neutrinos from a nucleus by a method similar to the radiation theory of photon emission from atoms. Treating the beta decay as a transition that depended upon the strength of coupling between the initial and final states, Fermi developed a… Read More

Halle: Rengerschen Buchhandlung10, 1803. 1st Edition. FIRST EDITION, FULL VOLUME WITH ORIGINAL FRONT WRAP BOUND IN, OF THE FIRST FULLY DEVELOPED PAPER DESCRIBING RITTER'S DISCOVERY OF ULTRAVIOLET RADIATION. Ritter had ‘announced' the discovery in a half page letter in the 1802 Annalen. In discovering ultraviolet light, or light without heat, Ritter had discovered an analog to Herschel's infrared light, or heat without light (Kittler, Optical Media, 123). Ultraviolet radiation is in the part of the electromagnetic spectrum where wavelengths are shorter than that of visible light but longer than X-rays, specifically, it is composed of three types of rays and has a wavelength from 10nm to 400 nm (Wikipedia). In 1800, William Herschel discovered infrared light. To test the temperatures of differently colored light, Herschel channeled sunlight through a prism. The prism split the colors into a rainbow whose colors Herschel had directed to each fall on a different thermometers. The experiment made… Read More

London: Macmillan Co, 1997. 1st Edition. Full volume. 1st EDITION WITH ORIGINAL FRONT WRAP PRESENT OF THE LANDMARK CLONING OF THE FIRST MAMMAL, DOLLY. NO ADDRESS LABEL. British biologists Sir Ian Wilmut and Keith Campbell announced the cloning of Dolly in this paper, the first account of their efforts and research. Considered one of the most significant scientific breakthroughs in history, Dolly's birth (and survival until 2003) proved that mammals could be cloned from adult somatic cells through the process of nuclear transfer - essentially, adult cells could reprogram themselves into a new being. "Working at the Roslin Institute [part of the University of Edinburgh] in the mid-1990s, Keith Campbell, a coworker of Wilmut's "found a way to turn back the clock of a mature, differentiated cell. He deprived cultured udder (mammary) cells from adult ewes of nutrients for five days, forcing the cells into a ‘sleeping' state in which many of their genes shut down. Wilmut and Campbell fused each… Read More

New York: AAAS, 1970. 1st Edition. FIRST EDITION OF THE FIRST PICTURES OF INDIVIDUAL ATOMS WITHIN A MOLECULAR STRUCTURE. Note that this paper includes those photographs. "Although individual atoms [had] been produced by field ion microscopes, there previously had been no way to reveal a single atom within a molecular structure" (Fling, First Photographs of a Single Atom, American Institute of Biological Sciences, 918, August 1970). Using a scanning transmission electron microscope (STEM) Albert Crewe made headlines around the world. "In 1964 Crewe, a professor emeritus in physics at the University of Chicago and former director of Argonne National Laboratory, invented the scanning transmission electron microscope (STEM) based on a concept that came to him on an airplane trip. Crewe used focused beams of electrons instead of light waves for magnification. Because electron waves are thousands of times shorter than light waves, they can be used to resolve much smaller objects than can be seen through… Read More

Leipzig: Verlag von Johann Ambrosius Barth, 1896. 1st Edition. Handsomely bound FIRST EDITION OF ONE OF BOLTZMANN'S MOST IMPORTANT WORKS. Vorlesungen über Gastheorie [Lectures on Gas Theory] is Boltzmann's "masterpiece of theoretical physics. This work can rightly be considered the peak of development achieved in the modern kinetic theory of gases" (Stanitz and Christie's 2012 Auction). "Containing a comprehensive exposition of the kinetic theory of gases., Boltzmann combines rigorous mathematical analysis with a pragmatic treatment of physical and chemical applications" (Kac, Probability and Related Topics, 261). "Ludwig Boltzmann (1844-1906) is generally acknowledged as one of the most important physicists of the nineteenth century. Particularly famous is his statistical explanation of the second law of thermodynamics" (Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy). "Throughout his career, even in his works on subject other than kinetic theory, Boltzmann was concerned with the mathematical problems… Read More

Leipzig: Johann Ambrosius Barth, 1837. 1st Edition. FIRST EDITION, FIRST PRINTING OF SCHWANN'S SEMINAL WORK ON PUTREFACTION AND FERMENTATION, HERE PROVING THAT PUTREFACTION IS PRODUCED BY LIVING BODIES" (Garrison & Morton, 674). Full volume. With this work, Schwann "proved categorically that alcoholic fermentation was the result of a living organism, not an inanimate chemical mass" (Hornsey, A History, 409) Independently of Cagniard-Latour, Schwann discovered the yeast cell" (GM 674). At the time, the prevailing theory was that fermentation was caused by oxidation and Schwann's discovery that alcoholic fermentation and the fermentation that causes putrefaction were carried out by microbes was ignored and even ridiculed at the time. "Today, he is regarded as the founder of the germ theory of putrefaction and fermentation" (ibid). Theodor Schwann (1810-1882) was a German anatomist and physiologist; his mentor was Johannes Múller, often regarded as the father of experimental physiology. In the 1930s,… Read More