Books offered by JF Ptak Science Books

The Foundations of the Big Bang

Gamow, Alpher, Bethe,  The Origin of the Chemical Elements.  American Physical Society,  1948.  Physical Review vol 73, April 1, 1948  Original printed wrappers.  Very fine condition.  We offer the original issue of 1 April 1948, with its pristine original wrappers, cleanly removed from a larger bound volume.

The Big Bang: the great Alpher/Bethe/Gamow paper and all-time insider-bad-joke, coming in the 1 April 1948 issue of the Physical Review. The letter to the editor which announced Gamow's (et alia) theory on background radiation and the formulation of the "Big Bang". This is one of the great discoveries of the century--it didn't have the implications of the (troublesome and tiresome) James Watson's DNA "discovery", but it certainly had other enormous intellectual and philosophical (and scientific of course) ramifications. Alpher, Ralph; George Gamow [& Hans Bethe, for the fictionalized use of his name only, for the capital "Beta", and this ABC paper].

"The Origin of the Chemical Elements". In: Physical Review, 73, April-June, 1948, contained on Pp 803-804 [1948]. Original green wrappers are all bound in for all of the issues the three months. This is about as close to NEW as one could get, I think, for this paper. The red binding is cloth and also VERY FINE. Really extraordianarily nice condition.  $1650.00

_____. Another copy, removed from the larger bound volume, with evidence of removal on spine.  Not accopmpanied by the original wrappers.  Fine copy otherwise.  $500

Fermi,  Enrico.  On the Origin of Cosmic Radiation.  American Physical Society,  1949.  1st edition.  Physical Review, 75, pp. 1169-1174 [1949]  Original wrappers.  Fine condition. $1500.

The reason for the expense here is that this paper is in the same issue as the epochal Bardeen/Brattain transistor action paper*** Besides naming the neutron, bringing about the first self-sustaining nuclear reaction ('42), and other works in high energy physics, Fermi (Doctorate U Pisa 1922 at 21 years old, Nobel Prize 1938)developed this (above) theory of cosmic ray origin.

From the APS website, the abstract for the article: "A theory of the origin of cosmic radiation is proposed according to which cosmic rays are originated and accelerated primarily in the interstellar space of the galaxy by collisions against moving magnetic fields. One of the features of the theory is that it yields naturally an inverse power law for the spectral distribution of the cosmic rays. The chief difficulty is that it fails to explain in a straight-forward way the heavy nuclei observed in the primary radiation."  

The Creation of Radio Astronomy, 1933

Jansky, Karl G.  "Electrical Disturbances Apparently of Extraterrestrial Origin".  In:  Proceedings of the Institute of Radio Engineers, volume 21, #10, October 1933, the paper (pp 1389-1398) contained in the bound volume for the half-year July-December 1933, pp 887-1762, complete.  Very nice copy, bound in half-leather.  Ex-library, Bureau of Engineering, U.S. Navy, with a small gilt-stamped name on the spine bottom and a bookplate.  The book is very sturdily bound.  Part of a trio of milestone papers for the discovery of extraterrestrial radio waves which led to the development of radio astronomy.  $350

Shapley and the Expanding Universe

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.

On the Discovery of Light Beyond the Visible, 1800

WIlliam Herschel.  "Untersuchungen über die wärmende und die erleuchtende Kraft der farbigen Sonnenstrahlen; Versuch über die nichht-sichbaren Strahlen der Sonne und deren Brechbarkeit; und Einrichtung grosser Teleskope Sonnenbeobachtungen."  Published in the Annalen der Physik, published in Halle, Rengerschen Buchhandlung, 1801. Band. 7, Zweites Stück.We offer the entire volume for the half-year, 644pp, 4 plates.   The Herschel paper occupies pp 137-156, with two engraved plates. Very nice copy. This is the first German edition of Herschel's ephocal discovery (of 1880, "An Investigation of the Powers of Prismatic Colours to Heat and Illuminate Objects") of a light beyond red, now called the "infared" $250

The Big Bang

Gamow, Alpher, Bethe,  The Origin of the Chemical Elements.  American Physical Society,  1948.  Physical Review vol 73, April 1, 1948  Original printed wrappers.  Very fine condition.  We offer the original issue of 1 April 1948, with its pristine original wrappers, cleanly removed from a larger bound volume. The Big Bang: the great Alpher/Bethe/Gamow paper and all-time insider-bad-joke, coming in the 1 April 1948 issue of the Physical Review. The letter to the editor which announced Gamow's (et alia) theory on background radiation and the formulation of the "Big Bang". This is one of the great discoveries of the century--it didn't have the implications of the (troublesome and tiresome) James Watson's DNA "discovery", but it certainly had other enormous intellectual and philosophical (and scientific of course) ramifications. Alpher, Ralph; George Gamow [& Hans Bethe, for the fictionalized use of his name only, for the capital "Beta", and this ABC paper]. "The Origin of the Chemical Elements". In: Physical Review, 73, April-June, 1948, contained on Pp 803-804 [1948]. Original green wrappers are all bound in for all of the issues the three months. THis is about as close to NEW as one could get, I think, for this paper. The red binding is cloth and also VERY FINE. Really extraordianarily nice condition.  $2500.

Very, Very Early Paper on Gravitational Lensing: Zwicky, 1937

Zwicky,  Fritz. "On the Probability of Detecting Nebulae Which Act as Gravitational Lenses."  American Physical Society,  1937.  1st edition. Being an article in  The Physical Review, 51 (8), April 15, 1937  Original printed wrappers.  Fine condition. $550

This is perhaps the first major announceement on the use of gravitational lensing following the very (very) brief notice that Einstein sent to Science magazine in 1936 (and which was a follow-up on some earlier thinking (24 years earlier) he had done on the gravitational lens).

"In 1937 Zwicky thought of another way to investigate dark matter. If by chance a massive galaxy lies along our line of sight to a more distant galaxy, it could act as a “gravitational lens,” warping the surrounding space to magnify, distort, and even multiply the image of the background galaxy. This was a direct application of Einstein’s Theory of General Relativity. The bending of starlight by the gravity of the Sun had already been demonstrated in 1919. Zwicky predicted that massive galaxies would similarly distort the light rays from background objects and that the distortion could be used to “weigh” the lensing galaxies. Most astronomers did not take this idea seriously. But in 1979, five years after Zwicky died, the first of many gravitational lenses was discovered, and a cottage industry has since emerged to find and study them. The lensing effect is now used to measure the cosmological parameters of the universe, and to reveal distant objects otherwise too faint to see."  --COSMIC HORIZONS: ASTRONOMY AT THE CUTTING EDGE, edited by Steven Soter and Neil deGrasse Tyson, a publication of the New Press. © 2000 American Museum of Natural History Source

EINSTEIN ONLINE, from the caltech website: "Fritz Zwicky (1898-1974), an astronomer at the California Institute of Technology, discussed the possibility of observing the lensing effect in the case of the recently discovered extragalactic nebula, in other words: other galaxies. The typical masses, sizes and mutual distances of galaxies are such that double images of a distant galaxy should be significantly more frequent than double images of stars: The necessary near-alignment of a closer object, a more distant object and an observer here on Earth is much more probable for galaxies than for stars."

And also: "If ever a competition were held for the most unrecognized genius of twentieth century astronomy, the winner surely would be Fritz Zwicky (1898–1974). A bold and visionary scientist, Zwicky was far ahead of his time in conceiving of supernovas, neutron stars, dark matter, and gravitational lenses. His innovative work in any one of these areas would have brought fame and honors to a scientist with a more conventional personality. But Zwicky was anything but conventional. In addition to his brilliant insights that turned out to be right, he also entertained notions that were merely eccentric. To his senior colleagues he could be arrogant and abrasive. He referred contemptuously to “the useless trash in the bulging astronomical journals.” He once said, “Astronomers are spherical bastards. No matter how you look at them they are just bastards.” His colleagues did not appreciate this aggressive attitude and, mainly for that reason, despite Zwicky’s major contributions to astronomy, he remains virtually unknown to the public."

Fine Cosmographical Print by Samuel Dunn, 1774

Cosmography Epitomized in Six Copper Plate Delineations by S. Dunn, 1774. 1774 (dated in the plate) Engraving on heavy laid paper. Samuel Dunn 15 x 21 inch image on an 18 x 22 inch sheet. Fine condition.  This is just a brilliant impression of this lovely print--very dark, highly defined, and nearly leaping from the paper. Just superb, with just abit of overshadow bewteen the 1-inch tall lettering at top. SImply a beautiful engraving, the appreciation of which is unfortuantely lacking in our scan of this oversize item. Samuel Dunn (mathematician and entrepreneur) was a teacher of mathematical sciences in London, a precise mapmaker and occasional atlas publisher, and member of the Philosophical Society in Philadelphia.  $200

Astronomy Print: an Analemma, by Samuel Dunn, 1774.

An Analemma, Shewing by Inspection, the Time of the Sun Rising and Sun Setting... 1774 (dated in the plate).  Engraving on heavy laid paper..  Samuel Dunn.  Fine condition. 15 x 21 inch image on an 18 x 22 inch sheet. Samuel Dunn (mathematician and entrepreneur) was a teacher of mathematical sciences in London, a precise mapmaker and occasional atlas publisher, and member of the Philosophical Society in Philadelphia. The analemma is a term in astronomy used to describe the plot of the different positions of the Sun in the celestial sphere recorded at a the same time of day (at 24 hour intervals) and from the same location on successive days through the calendar year. This appears as a figure of eight. If the course of the earth around the sun were a precise circle and if the earth's polar axis stood perpendicular to the plane of its orbit, the sun would always appear at the same point in the sky at the same time of day throughout the year and no analemma would be seen. If the orbit were circular, but the polar axis tilted as it is, the northern and southern lobes of the figure of eight would be equal in size; if the polar axis were not tilted but the orbit had its current eccentricity then the analemma would be a straight east-to-west line. It is possible to construct an analemma by taking a photograph of the sun each day of the year at the same time and place and with a camera positioned in exactly the same way each time.  $150.00

Oppenheimer & Volkoff on Collapsing Stars, 1939//the TOV Limit

Oppenheimer,  J. Robert and George Volkoff.  "On Massive Neutron Cores."  Lancaster:  The Physical Review,  1939.  1st edition.  Physical Review 55/4, February 15, 1939  8vo.  Original printed wrappers.  Very good condition.  Fine copy of Oppenheimer and George Volkoff's great paper, which occupies pp 374-382 of this issue containing pp 323-420. Very nice copy.  $400.  This is the paper in which the Tolman-Oppenheimer-Volkoff limit appers, based on the earlier work of Richard C. Tolman: R.C. Tolman (1939). "Static Solutions of Einstein's Field Equations for Spheres of Fluid". The Physical Review, 55 (4): 364–373.

 From the PROLA website: "It has been suggested that, when the pressure within stellar matter becomes high enough, a new phase consisting of neutrons will be formed. In this paper we study the gravitational equilibrium of masses of neutrons, using the equation of state for a cold Fermi gas, and general relativity. For masses under 1/3 solar masses only one equilibrium solution exists, which is approximately described by the nonrelativistic Fermi equation of state and Newtonian gravitational theory. For masses 1/3 < M < 3/4 solar masses two solutions exist, one stable and quasi-Newtonian, one more condensed, and unstable. For masses greater than 3/4 solar masses there are no static equilibrium solutions. [The maximum mass of a stable neutron star is now believed to be about 3 solar masses, not 3/4 solar masses. Since Oppenheimer did his calculations, physicists learned that the repulsive force between closely packed neutrons is greater than he thought.] These results are qualitatively confirmed by comparison with suitably chosen special cases of the analytic solutions recently discovered by Tolman. A discussion of the probable effect of deviations from the Fermi equation of state suggests that actual stellar matter after the exhaustion of thermonuclear sources of energy will, if massive enough, contract indefinitely, although more and more slowly, never reaching true equilibrium." 

On Volkoff (from the Physics Today website): "As a graduate student at the University of California, Berkeley, he wrote his first--and most famous--paper, "On Massive Neutron Cores," with Oppenheimer as coauthor. In this paper, published only a decade after the advent of quantum mechanics and a few years after the discovery of the neutron and the beginning of nuclear physics, George gave detailed calculations of stellar collapse--during a supernova--into a neutron star. After earning his Ph.D. in physics at Berkeley in 1940, he investigated more topics in nuclear physics, including early work on tensor forces with Eugene Wigner at Princeton University. "