Books offered by JF Ptak Science Books

Dorritt Hoffleit.  Two papers:

1) The Discovery and Exploitation of Spectroscopic Parallaxes.  Offprint:  Popular Astronomy, vol LVIII, Nos 9+10, Vol LIX,  November, December, 1950 and January 1951.  45pp.

2) The Quest for the Stellar Parallax.  Offprint: Popular Astronomy, vol LVII, No 6, June 1949.  14pp. 

Both printed wrappers.  Very nice copies.  $35

Shapley--the Great Debate and the Expanding Universe, 1921-1938

Three Papers by Harlow Shapley

(1) Harlow Shapley and Heber D. Curtis.  "The Scale of the Universe."  Separate printing, Bulletin of the National Research Council, Vol 2, part 3, number 11, May 1921.  Pp 171-217. Original printed wrappers.  A Good (and perhaps a Very Good) copy, pretty well read.

Full text of the report here.

A good explanation of the debate between Curtis and Shapley lives at the NASA site here:

"Although the `Great Debate' is important to different people for different reasons, it is a clear example of humanity once again striving to find its place within the cosmic order. In the debate, Shapley and Curtis truly argued over the ``Scale of the Universe," as the debate's title suggests. Curtis argued that the Universe is composed of many galaxies like our own, which had been identified by astronomers of his time as ``spiral nebulae". Shapley argued that these ``spiral nebulae" were just nearby gas clouds, and that the Universe was composed of only one big Galaxy. In Shapley's model, our Sun was far from the center of this Great Universe/Galaxy. In contrast, Curtis placed our Sun near the center of our relatively small Galaxy. Although the fine points of the debate were more numerous and more complicated, each scientist disagreed with the other on these crucial points."

"A partial resolution of the debate came in the mid-1920's. Using the 100 inch Hooker Telescope at Mount Wilson, then the largest telescope in the world, astronomer Edwin Hubble identified Cepheid variable stars in the Andromeda Galaxy (M31) . These stars allowed Hubble to show that the distance to M31 was greater than even Shapley's proposed extent of our Milky Way galaxy. Therefore M31 was a galaxy much like our own. In the 1930s, the further discovery of interstellar absorption combined with an increased understanding of the distances and distribution of globular clusters ultimately led to the acceptance that the size of our Milky Way Galaxy had indeed been seriously underestimated and that the Sun was not close to the center. Therefore, Shapley was proved more correct about the size of our Galaxy and the Sun's location in it, but Curtis was proved correct that our Universe was composed of many more galaxies, and that ``spiral nebulae" were indeed galaxies just like our own."

And what about the "great" part of this debate?  Well, it was, it just wasn't very well known outside academic circles, and certainly didn't take hold of the popular imagination of the time. So it really was a great debate--it was just quiet.

 

Shapley, Harlow (1906-1966). Two papers.

(2) On the Distribution of Galaxies.  Pp 389-393.

(3) Note on the Problem of the Expanding Universe. Pp 148-154.

Both offprints from The Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences,  19/4 (April 1933) and 24/3 (1938), respectively.  Both very good copies.

$300 for the three.

Chandrasekhar and the Kerr Black Hole

JF Ptak Science Books

Six papers by Chandrasekhar on the Kerr black hole.  All are with wrappers front and back, five are in larger bound volumes.  All from Royal Society of London Proceedings, A, Mathematical and Physical Sciences.  All have ex-library markings.  All quite fine and fresh otherwise.  Includes the four parts of The gravitational perturbations of the Kerr black hole. All:  $210

1. Chandrasekhar. The Kerr metric and stationary axisymmetric gravitational fields.  Pp 405-420. 16 January 1978.
2. Chandrasekhar. The gravitational perturbations of the Kerr black hole I.  Pp 421-439 16 January 1978.
3. Chandrasekhar. The gravitational perturbations of the Kerr black hole. II. Pp. 441-465. 16 January 1978.   
4. Chandrasekhar. The gravitational perturbations of the Kerr black hole. III.  further Applications. Pp 425-451. 27 April 1979.   (Bound with  On the equations governing the perturbations of the Reissner-Nordstrom black hole." Pp 467-494)
5. Chandrasekhar. The gravitational perturbations of the Kerr black hole. IV.  Pp 475-484. 31 October 1980.  Printed wrappers.  Several ex-library marks two call  number stickers front and back wrappers. 
6. Chandrasekhar. On the reflexion and transmission of neutrino waves by a Kerr black hole.  Pp 325-338, 7 January 1977.

Oppenheimer

“On continued gravitational contraction” by Robert Oppenheimer and Hartland Snyder, & “The mechanism of nuclear fission”, by Niels Bohr and J.A. Wheeler, both appearing in the Physical Review, September 1, 1939, Vol. 56, #5, pp. 426-50 and pp. 455-59, respectively. 

First editions of these two papers, presented in the original wrappered issue of the great Physical Review.

They appear together in a single issue of the journal, a remarkable set of achievements found in one small space--remarkable even more for the fact that 1939 (as with 1859, 1543, and 1948) is one of those remarkable single years in the history of science.

The Oppenheimer and Snyder (a graduate assistant) paper is one of the most prescient in the history of modern physics, correctly physically describing (where Chandrasekjar and Eddington in their discussions did not) what happens in a particular collapse of a neutron star, and still today reads as fresh and and brightly as it did in 1939.  Really, it is an extraordinary work, and a foundation paper in the history of gravitation, the application of RT, singularity, and astrophysics.  (The Southampton GR Explorer site nicely states it this way: "This paper has strong claims to being one of the most prophetic ever written in this field of research. Today, 60 years later, this paper needs little revision - even the terminology is undated!")

In an often-repeated quotation, they write, somewhat in irony and in a certain and understated manner on page 456: "The star thus tends to close itself off from any communication with a distant observer; only its gravitational field persists". And later: "When all thermonuclear sources of energy are exhausted, a sufficiently heavy star will collapse. Unless fission due to rotation, the radiation of mass, or the blowing off of mass by radiation, reduce the star's mass to the order of that of the sun, this contraction will continue indefinitely", they wrote.

 

Next comes Bohr and Wheeler, “The mechanism of nuclear fission” is the experimental foundation stone (on the basis of the liquid drop model of atomic nuclei) of nuclear fission and the great leap forward in the construction of the atomic bomb.

Condition: the paper of the spine of the publication is about one-third owrn away, otherwise this is a very nice copy. Price:  $2500, with the condition noted. 

For the whole article see here.

From the abstract: "On the basis of the liquid drop model of atomic nuclei, an account is given of the mechanism of nuclear fission. In particular, conclusions are drawn regarding the variation from nucleus to nucleus of the critical energy required for fission, and regarding the dependence of fission cross section for a given nucleus on energy of the exciting agency. A detailed discussion of the observations is presented on the basis of the theoretical considerations. Theory and experiment fit together in a reasonable way to give a satisfactory picture of nuclear fission".

________.  Another copy, this removed from a larger bound volume, without wrappers.  $1250

 

Oppenheimer,  J.R..  Note on Light Quanta and the Electromagentic Field.  American Physical Society,  1931.  The Physical Review, vol 38, number 4, Aug 15, 1931  Oppenheimer's contribution occupies pp 725-747--hardly a "note" as stated in the title, especially by the Phys Rev standards, making this I think something on the order of a top 55-in-length or so article. We offer the entire issue, complete in the scarce outer wrappers. The following abstract is taken entirely from the beautiful and highly useful APS PROLA site: "J. R. Oppenheimer University of California, Berkeley, California Received 26 June 1931 1. Introduction: light quantum theory and quantum electrodynamics. 2. Extreme light quantum theory; spin of quantum; wave equation for quanta; eigenwerte and solutions of the equation; electrostatic quanta; angular momentum and selection rules; Lorentz covariance; theory of the charge-free field; quanta and electrons. 3. Quantum electromagnetics; reformulation to treat progressive and spherical waves; integrals of momentum and angular momentum; new introduction of light quantum equation; distinction between field and corpuscular theories; zero point energy, negative energies, and electromagnetic mass. 4. Interaction of quanta and charges; critique of light quantum theory."   $400.00

Oppenheimer,  J.R..  On the Selection Rules in Beta-Decay.  American Physical Society,  1941.  The Physical Review, 59 (11) June 1, 1941  Original printed wrappers.  Very good condition.  Oppenheimer's contribution is a letter to the editor, appearing on page 908.   $200.00

Oppenheimer,  J.R..  On the Interaction of Mesotrons and Nuclei.  APS,  1941.  The Physical Review, 60, July 15, 1941  The Oppenheimer (with Julian Schwinger) paper occupies pp 150-153 in this issue of pp 67-167.    $200.00

Oppenheimer,  J.R..  On the Limitations of the Theory of the Positron.  American Physical Society,  1934.  1st edition.  The Physical Review, 45(12), June 15, 1934  8vo.  Original printed wrappers.  Fine condition.  Written with W.H. Furry.    $175.00

Oppenheimer,  J.R..  Note on Charge and Field Fluctuation AND Note on the Production of Pairs by Charged Particles.  Lancaster, PA:  American Physical Society,  1935.  The Physical Review  Original printed wrappers.  Two contributions here in the January 15 1935 issue of the PR: combiend they range from pp 144-148. Other contributors to the issue include Eugene Feenberg, WW Hansen, John Rose and others.   $250.00

Oppenheimer,  J.R..  On the Quantum Theory of the Capture of Electrons.  Minneapolis:  American Physical Society,  1928.  The Physical review, Vol 31 Num 3, MArch 1928.  Original printed wrappers.  Very good condition.  An early contribution by JRO to the field of quantum mechanics, published back when the PR was published only once a month. His paper occupies pp 349-357; the entire monthly issue is offered here containing pp 317-498.   $300.00

Oppenheimer,  J. Robert.  On the Quantum Theory of Electronic Impacts.  Lancaster:  The Physical Review,  1928.  1st edition.  The Physical Review, 32/3, September 1928  8vo.  Original printed wrappers.  Good or better condition.  The Oppenheimer article occupies pp 361-377 in this issue of pp 331-531. Other constributors include Slater, Mulliken, Lawrence and many others. In the original green wrappers, uncommon.   $200.00

Oppenheimer,  J.R..  Note on the Theory of the Interaction of Field and Matter.  Menasha, Wisconsin:  American Physical Society,  1930.  The Physical Review, Vol 35, Num 5, pp 461-478  Original printed wrappers.  One of the longest so-called "notes" in the PR JRO's contribution here in the early new quantum mechanics is noted in J. Mehra's "Historical Development of the Quantum Theory" volume 6.    $400.00

Oppenheimer,  J.R..  Note on Statistics of the Nuclei.  Minneapolis:  American Physical Society,  1931.  The Physical review, Vol 37, Num 4  Original printed wrappers.  Written with Paul Ehrenfest, the JRO paper appears on pp 333-339 of this issue (paginated pp 333-457).    $150.00

Oppenheimer,  J.R..  On the Spin of the Mesotron.  American Physical Society,  1941.  1st edition.  The Physical Review, 59 (5), March 1 1941  Original printed wrappers.  Fine condition.  Oppenheimer's contribution is a letter to the editor, pp 462-3. We offer the entire weekly issue in the original green wrappers.   $250.00

Oppenheimer,  J. Robert.  Einstein.  Lancaster Pa:  American Physical Society,  1956.  1st edition.  Reviews of Modern Physics 28/1 Janurary 1956  4to.  Original printed wrappers.  Good or better condition.  This is a short (2pp) recollection by Oppenheimer, comprising the opening section of this 75pp issue. Uncommon.  $125.00

"His presence among us stayed us from the worst folly, and touched those who knew him with the light of magnanimity".

Chandrasekhar, S.  "On algebraically special perturbations of black holes." In: Proceedings of the Royal Society, Series A, #1802, 8 March 1984, volume 392.  Article occupies pp 1-13 int he issue of 1-245pp.  Original wrappers, ex-library, with stamps on front and back wrappers.  Nice copy for this.  $50

"Algebraically special perturbations of black holes excite gravitational  waves that are either purely ingoing or purely outgoing. Solutions, appropriate to such perturbations of the Kerr, the Schwarzschild, and the Reissner-Nordstrom black-holes, are obtaine in explicit forms by different methods. The  different methods illustrate the remarkable inner relations among  different facets of the mathematical theory. In the context of the  Kerr black-hole they derive from the different ways in which the  explicit value of the Starobinsky constant emerges, and in the context of the Schwarzschild and the Reissner-Nordstrom black-holes  they derive from the potential barriers surrounding them belonging to a special class."--from the Royal Society site

Laplace,  Simon.  Exposition du Systeme du Monde.  Paris:  Bachelier,  1835.  6th edition.  Half-leather.  Very good condition.  Large paper copy (or seemingly so), lacking the portrait. Very nicely bound in half morocco and marbled boards.   (Book ID 6456)  $500.00

Crookes, Sir WIlliam T.  "On the Photographic Spectra of Meteorites". Offprint: Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series A, Containing Papers of a Mathematical or Physical Character, Volume 217, pp. 411-430.  1916.  Original wrappers.  Very good copy.  $125

Full text:  http://archive.org/details/philtrans03961425

Review of the work in volume 21 in Science Abstracts:

JF Ptak Science Books   

WIlliam Herschel.  "Observations tending to investigate the Nature of the Sun in order to find the Cause of Symptoms of its Variable Emission of Light and Heat".  Philosophical Transactions, 1801.  Pp 265-318, 2 plates.  Removed from larger bound volume.  Very good copy.  $250

While flipping through William Herschel's 1801 Philosophical Transactions paper "Observations tending to investigate the Nature of the Sun in order to find the Cause of Symptoms of its Variable Emission of Light and Heat", I thought it was a good early-ish paper on sunspots.  I was surprised to find a lengthy entry on the applied nature of his findings, and that on the variable nature of sunspots and agricultural yield as determined by wheat prices found in Adam Smith's Wealth of Nations.  Honestly I was fully unaware of Herschel's involvement with sunspots and seasonal growth and price fluctuations, but there it was.  And he does find a correlation, albeit a very cautious one where he says the subject deserves more study and more data.

He writes: "it seems probable that some temporary scarcity or defect of vegetation has taken place, when the sun has been without those appearances which we surmise to be the symptoms of a copious emission of light and heat..."

This must make Herschel--already a celebrity astronomer for his discovery of the first planet discovered since ancient times, Uranus, among many other things--one of the earliest (if not the first) astronomer to experimentally entertain the effects of solar disturbances on the Earth.  And this on sunspots years before Schwabe established the periodicity of sunspots (1846) or the electromagnetic connection with sunspots (that would come only with G.E. Hale in 1908).  Herschel (who left/fled Germany to reside in England) was a man of interesting sight: he discovered Uranus, identified new moons of Saturn, established that the previously-nebulous nebulae were collections of vast numbers of distant and faint clouds, drew a spectacular image of the Milky Way galaxy as an outside observer looking in, that there was a light from the sun that was beyond the visible spectrum, and also discovered in the micro-world found that coral were animals rather than plants.The business of trying to see if there were any correlations between solar activity and plant production on Earth was novel, and interesting. 

In the Edinburgh Review for 1825 we find:

Perhaps the Earliest Originator of the Theory of the Expansion of the Universe

It is necessary that we lived, despite the fall of so many heavens
DH Lawrence, Lady Chatterley's Lover (1928)

Abbe Georges Lemaitre.  "La Theorie de la Relativite et l'Experience".  Pp 346-375. In:  Revue des Questions Scientifiques publiee par la Societe Scientifique de Bruxelles.  Quartieme Serie, Tome IX, 2^d Fasicule, 20 Avril 1926.
Offered in the entire volumes for 20 April, 1926, comprising pp 321-582, in the original wrappers.  Very nice copy. Scarce. $175

With an interesting timeline from the appendix to

L'INVENTION DU BIG BANG par J.-P. Luminet Copyright : Editions du Seuil, Paris

Ce texte est l'introduction de l'ouvrage A. Friedmann, G. Lemaître : Essais de Cosmologie , traduction et notes de J.-P. Luminet et A. Grib, Le Seuil, collections "Sources du Savoir", Paris, 1997.

Timeline:

John William Nicholson / mathematical and astronomical papers, 1905-1916.  38 offprints, all in original wrappers.  [Sold]

The following from the Oxford University site, Mathematics at Balliol College, Modern:

"John Nicholson was Mathematics Tutor at Balliol from 1919-1931. Around 1912 Nicholson had been the first to realise that in quantum theory the angular momentum of particles must be quantised, and that this fact should make it possible to explain the spectra of atoms. Unfortunately, Rutherford's work on the structure of atoms was not yet complete, so Nicholson was forced to work with an incorrect model of the atom, and his results were correspondingly modest. When in the following year Bohr coupled Nicholson's idea of quantised angular momentum with Rutherford's planetary model of the atom everything fitted perfectly and provided the first theoretical understanding of Balmer's empirical spectral formulae. Nicholson felt that he never received the proper recognition for his contribution and increasingly consoled himself with the contents of the College cellar. By 1930 he was no longer capable of carrying out his tutorial duties, and he spent the last twenty-five years of his life, practically forgotten, in the Warneford Hospital."

He was also "Isaac Newton Student and Scholar of Trinity College" in 1907 at least, and recipient of the Adams Prize in 1919.  Interestingly he married Dorothy Maud Wrinch (1894-1976) in 1922--she was the fist female DSc of Oxford, had studied under Russell (and produced in some way the publication of the Tractatus, was an assistant to Jeffries and had in some ways made significant contributions to mathematics and biology. 

Nicholson's Papers:

• On Electrical Vibrations between Confocal Elliptic Cylinders... Philosophical Magazine, August 1905.
• The Symmetrical Vibrations of ethe Conducting Surfaces of Revolution,  PM, May 1906.
• A General Solution of the ElectromagneticRelations.  Philosophical Magazine, February 1907.
• A Type of Asymptotic Summation.  Messenger of Mathematics, 1907.
• The Asymptotic Expansion of Bessel Functions of High Order. PM, December 1907.
• The Scattering of Sound by Spheroids and Disks. PM, 1907.
• On Bessel Functions of Equal Argument and Order. Philosophical Magazine, August 1908.
• On the Relation of Airy's Integral to the Bessel Functions.  PM, July 1909
• Inductance and Resistance in Telephone and other Circuits. PM, September 1909. 
• The Accelerated Motion of an Electrified Sphere. Philosophical Magazine, 1910.
• The Asymptotic Expansion of Bessel Functions. PM, February, 1910.
• The Pressure of Radiation on Reflecting Spherical Particles. MNRAS, May 1910.
• Ont eh Size of the Tail-PArticles of Comets, and their Scattering Effect on Sunlgiht.  PM, April 1910.
• The Accelerated Motion of a Dielectric Sphere. PM, November 1910.
• The Approximate Calculation of Bessel Functions of Imaginary Argument. PM, December, 1910.
• On Bending of Electric Waves ROund a LArge Sphere. PM, APril 1910-Nov 1912.
• Note on the Optical Properties of Fused Metals. PM, August 1911.
• The  products of Bessel Functions.  Quarterly Journal of Pure and Applied Math, 1911.
• On the Number of Electrons concerned in Metallic Conduction.  PM, August, 1911.
• Notes on Bessel Functions.   Quarterly Journal of Pure and Applied Math, 1911
• A Type of Asymptotic Expansion of Legendre Functions.    Quarterly Journal of Pure and Applied Math,1911
• The Constitution of the Solar Corona, MNRAS Dec 1911 and Part II, June 1912 and Part III,Sept 1912
• A Possible Extension of the Spectrum of Hydrogen, MNRAS, May 1913.
• The Spectra if Wolf-Rayet Stars. MNRAS, December 1913. 
• The Physical Interpretation of the Spectrum of the Corona. The Observatory, February 1913.
• On the Nebular Line A3729.   Montly Notices RAS, May 1914
• Hydrogen and the Primary Constituents of Nebulae.  MNRAS, June 1914.
• High Frequnecy Spectra of teh Elements...PM, 1914.
• The Spectra of Hydrogen and Helium.  MNRAS, 1914. 
• The Nature of the Coronium Atom.  MNRAS, March 1916.
• On the Distribution of Intensity in Broadened Spectrum Lines. Phil Trans, June 28, 1916. (With T.R. Merton.)
• The Atomic Weights of the Elements in Nebulae.  MNRAS, Mar 1918.  
• On Intensity Relations in the Spectrum of Helium. Phil Trans, April 1918.  (With T.R. Merton.)

John William Nicholson, FRS (1 November 1881 – 3 October 1955) was an English mathematician.

John William Nicholson. 1881-1955Biogr. Mems Fell. R. Soc. November 1, 1956 2:209-214