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:
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. $125
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.
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:
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
Shapley, Harlow (1906-1966). Two papers.
(1) On the Distribution of GAlaxies. Pp 389-393.
(2) 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. $125, the pair.
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