Books offered by JF Ptak Science Books LLC

The Tipping Point of Degeneracy: Robert Oppenheimer and Black Holes, 1939

ITEM: Oppenheimer, J.R. and G.M. Volkoff. On Massive Neutron Cores. Physical Review 55, 1939, 15 February. Pp 374-382. Original printed wrappers.  Very nice copy.  Scarce.  $350

ref: JF Ptak Science Books   Post 1354

People tend to think of black holes as a Stephen Hawking-era phenomenon while the facts of the matter are that they began perhaps hundreds of year earlier, probably with Cambridge John Michell (1724-1793), back in the year of the end of the American Revolution, 1783 (and perhaps before).  His famous experiment (known as the "Cavendish Experiment") was really only rediscovered in the 1970's in Michell's correspondence with Henry Cavendish.  In those pages he hypothesized that there may evolve a star so massive (which he referred to as a "dark star' in Newtonian theory) that light itself might not be able to escape fro it, that the escape velocity for the light could never be reached, and that its phenomenal gravity would make the star impossibly dense.  This was very similar to the dark star hypothesis of Simon Pierre de Laplace in his epic Exposition du Systeme du Monde which was published in 1796. Karl Schwarzchild's 1916 paper using Einstein's relativity paper of the same year discussed the possibilities of singularity (the Schwazchild limit of the diameter of black holes), as did (the beautiful) Subrahmany Chandrasekhar (one of the last men able to know everything) in 1928. 

In hunting for a number of Richard Feynman papers here at the warehouse I happened to find this extraordinary effort by J. Robert Oppenheimer and G.M. Volkhoff in the 15 February 1939 issue of America's greatest journal contribution to physics, The Physical Review.  Here (along with a preceding paper by Richard C. Tolman, issued in the same issue just above Oppenheimer, which were the analytic analysis used by O+V to base their estimates of nuclear forces) was established the Tolman-Oppenheimer-Volkhoff limit, which stated that if the state of evolution of  neutrons forming a degenerate Fermi gas of extremely dense masses in neutron stars was more  massive than .07 solar masses that it would collapse into a black hole or exotic/quark star; if the mass was below that limit, the star would not collapse due to the degeneracy pressure of neutrons and the strong force.  The black hole part was left really to a second paper of 1 September 1939 (the day that the Nazis attacked Poland and the fighting began in World War II in Europe) when Oppenheimer teamed up with Hartland Snyder to write "On Continued Gravitational Contraction", when the two wrote about the singularity of the event.  the paper met with little appreciation at the time, though the two papers today have lead to some of the most progressive ideas in 21st century astrophysics.

Found in Stone: Geometry and Alphabets

ITEM:  original sheet from Athanasius Kircher's Mundus Subterranius, 1664.  14 x 10 inches.  Fine condition. $175.00

ref:  JF Ptak Science Books  Post 1353

I wrote about Athanasius Kircher's Mundus Subterreaneus (1664) a few days ago (in "Birds With Stone Wings", here and elsewhere), particularly staying within the first section of the eight book of Mundus, De Lapidibus, in which he investigated stones, gems, fossils and then "found figures" in agates. 

Kircher did not belive that finding these symbols in stone were a direct consequences of any supreme anything, recognizing that they were formed and collected by chance. He did formulate some interesting and early and sometimes-correct observations on the evolution of languages, but was entirely constrained by the authentic history as presented in the early books of the Bible.  While recognizing that languages of a certain region are or could be relational, and that the Romance languages were a corruption of Latin and that there was a  Semitic and Graeco-Latin connection, they were all necessarily descendants of Hebrew, which was the language given by the creator to man, mystical symbols handed down from Heaven to Adam.  And so it goes.

And in detail:

And then of course the stone-found geometrical figures:

  These engravings of the originals in Kircher's cabinets of curiosities did take some sharp-eyed sleuthing and gathering. 

Foundations for the First All-transistor Computer, 1950/1951

Among the Earliest Diagrams for a transistorized Computer  Ca. 1950/1

 

J.H. Felker.  Catalog of Digital Computer Designs.  [No place of publication and no date.]  I suspect that this is a Bell Laboratories (Whippany, New Jersey), publication which was printed in 1950/1951. [On dating this item:  I’m thinking that this paper was released before his other two papers in late 1951 as they are not referenced in the notes section.  Also there is no reference in the paper to an actual delivery date of the transistors, which Bell and Western Electric announced would be available “several months after” the first transistor conference in 1951.  Also the transistor pulse amplifier which Felker requires in his conclusions section seems to have been not available until 1953.]

 11x8 ½ inches.  18 pages of text, 18 leaves of diagrams and schematics.  All text and drawings are printed on one side of the page, only.  This seems to be offset-printed.  It also seems to be made for restricted circulation.  Very Good condition.  $3000 

 

 This is Felker’s OUTSTANDING orientation on constructing a transistorized computer.* He states in the second paragraph “this computer design philosophy was followed in the design of the National Bureau of Standards Computer SEAC. It is believed that the approach that will result in a vacuum-tubeless computer at the earliest date is to follow the SEAC example in so far as the use of germanium diode logic circuits is concerned, but replacing the vacuum tube amplifiers with transistor amplifiers.”  He states further:  “Since the transistor itself has voltage and current relationships quite similar to a germanium diode it is expected that the diodes in a transistor computer will operate in a more natural environment…and will exhibit…longer life and more reliable operation.”

 As a matter of fact all of the block diagrams in the illustration section are for “an all-semiconductor computer”.  Essentially these are among the earliest printed diagrams for a transistorized computer—and Felker would be the leader of the Bell team that constructed the world’s first all-transistor computer, the TRADIC, in 1955.

Felker was the leader of the Bell team that constructed the TRADIC, which was the world’s first fully transistorized computer.  It used 800 transistors and 10,000 germanium triodes and dispensed with vacuum tubes—it was much smaller (at three cubic feet) than any of its contemporaries, and was at least as fast as the fastest computer of the day.  It was also far more reliable, and far more dependable.

Felker concludes his paper thus:  “A fairly complete catalog of digital computer components has been given in block diagram form with estimates of the number of parts they require…  The principal conclusion to be drawn is that an all semiconductor computer can be built with diodes and transistors as soon as a transistor pulse amplifier with a high degree of reliability is available…”

The paper is structured in the following way, by sections:  (Synopsis and introduction); Basic Building Blocks; Switches; Handling of Negative Numbers; Adder; Accumulator; Multiplier; Divider; Translator; Binary Counter; Shift Registers; conclusions.

[The image to the right is folding, and thus partly obscured.]

The list of block diagrams, as follows:  Or-circuit; and-Circuit; Inhibitor Circuit; Amplifier with Pulse retiming; Storage Cell; a Simple Switch; an Eight Position Switch; Handling of Negative Numbers; Adder; Accumulator; Multiplier; Operation of Multiplier; Binary Division; Simplified Division Process; Divider; Translator; Binary counter; Shift register.

NOTES:

*For Felker's TRADIC Phase I computer project. See James R. Harris, "The Earliest Solid-State Digital Computers," IEEE Annals of the History of Computing, vol. 21, no. 4, pp. 49-54, Oct.-Dec. 1999, doi:10.1109/85.80153  AND  P.K. Giloth and R.C. Townley, TRADIC—Flyable Research Model Program, Summary Engineering Report, U.S. Air Force, Air Materiel Command, Dec.1 1958.

J.H. Felker, "Performance of the TRADIC Transistor Digital Computer," Proc. Eastern Joint Computer Conf., 1954, pp. 46-49. J.R. Harris, "TRADIC: The First Phase," Bell Laboratories Record, Vol. 36, Sept. 1958, pp. 330-334.

Felker.  Application of Transistors in a High-Speed Computer. Bell Labs Transistor Symposium, November 1951. (This is the event where MR. Felker was said to have amazed the other high-power attendees with his talk on transistor applications to the digital computer. 

Felker.  “The transistor as a digital computer component.”  AFIPS Joint Computer Conferences  Papers and discussions presented at the Dec. 10-12, 1951, joint AIEE-IRE computer conference: Review of electronic digital computers .

This is a picture of Mr. Felker, (kneeling), before the TRADIC.