Books offered by JF Ptak Science Books LLC

J.R. Oppenheimer and Julian Schwinger. "On the Interaction of Mesotrons and Ncueli." In: the Physical Review, volume 60, 15 July 1951.  Pp 150-152.  Offered in the original green-wrapper issue for 15 July, comprising pp 67-174.  Very good copy.  $150  [Referenced in Robert Serber's "Partcile Physics in the 193o's" in Laurie Brown's The Birth of Particle Physics.

Kusch & Foley,  "Magnetic Moment of the Electron."  American Physical Society,  1948.  The Physical Review, 74 (3), Aug 1 1948.  Original printed wrappers.  Very good condition. 

From Kusch's Nobel Prize (1955, physics) speech, "The magnetic moment of the electron Nobel Lecture, December 12, 1955":  "I must tell you, and with considerable regret, that I am not a theoretical physicist. A penetrating analysis of the part that the discovery and meas- urement of the anomalous magnetic moment of the electron has played in the development of certain aspects of contemporary theoretical physics must be left to the group of men who have in recent years devised the theoretical structure of quantum electrodynamics. My role has been that of an exper- imental physicist who, by observation and measurement of the properties and operation of the physical world, supplies the data that may lead to the formulation of conceptual structures. The consistency of the consequences of a conceptual structure with the data of physical experiment determines the validity of that structure as a description of the physical universe. Our early predecessors observed Nature as she displayed herself to them. As know- ledge of the world increased, however, it was not sufficient to observe only the most apparent aspects of Nature to discover her more subtle properties; rather, it was necessary to interrogate Nature and often to compel Nature, by various devices, to yield an answer as to her functioning. It is precisely the role of the experimental physicist to arrange devices and procedures that will compel Nature to make a quantitative statement of her properties and behav- ior. It is in this spirit that I propose to discuss my participation in a sequence of earlier experiments that made possible the precision determination of the magnetic moment of the electron. I will then discuss the experiments them-selves which have yielded our present knowledge of the magnetic properties of the electron."   $450.00

T.D. Lee and C.N. Yang.  "Questions of Parity Conservation in Weak Interactions" .  Lancaster, American Institute of Physics, 1956.  Volume 104, October 1, No. 1, 1956 of The Physical Review, Second Series.  Article occupies pp. 254-58 in the entire issue of 272pp.  Offered in the original wrappers.  First owner's name in (small) pen at top right corner of front wrapper, otherwise a FINE copy.  $1950.00

Offered with:

C.S. Wu, with E. Ambler, R.W. Hayward, et alia, "Experimental Test of Parity Conservation in Beta Decay", in the 15 February 1957 issue of The Physical Review, pp 1413-1414.  This is the experimetnal verification of the Lee and Wang paper of 1 Ocotber 1956. 

Nobel Prize awarded to the two in 1957--the quickest award and recognition in physics to date, "for their penetrating investigation of the so-called parity laws which has led to important discoveries regarding the elementary particles".

"The discovery of parity nonconservation contributed to a general change in the intellectual climate of fundamental physics, leading to a tendency to question the absolute validity of other conservation laws as well." (Helen Kragh, Quantum Generations, pp. 318-9).

“Following a suggestion made by the experimenter Martin Block, who was his room-mate at a conference in 1956 (at Rochester, in New York), Richard Feynman made the heretical proposal to the meeting that the theta and tau are different states of the same particle, which itself has no definite parity, and that parity is not always conserved. The idea was quickly taken up by Chen Ning Yang and Tsung Dao Lee, who showed that parity is not conserved in the weak interaction; their theory was immediately tested and proved correct by Chien Shiung Wu, and Yang and Lee received the Nobel Prize for their work in 1957- one of the quickest such awards ever made"--John Gribbin, Q is for Quantum.

One of the Foundation Papers in Quantum Electrodynamics

Julian Schwinger, "On Radiative Corrections to Electron Scattering." In: the Physical Review, volume 75, number 5, March 1, 1949; in the Letters section, occupying pp 898-899.  We offer the entire weekly issue, pp 705-911.  This is a near-Fine copy, with a pair of short tears on the original paper spine.  Scarce in such nice shape. $450

. This appears as paper #14 (of 7 papers by Schwinger) of the 34 collected papers in his classic reference Selected Papers on Quantum Electrodynamics (1958).

Louis de Broglie.  Theorie Generale des Particules a Spin (Methode de Fusion).  Paris, Gauthier-Villars, 1943. [First edition.] 201pp.  Uncut.  Very good copy in the original wrappers.  $185.00

Pauli on Relativistic Field Theory

Pauli, Wolfgang.   "Relativistic Field Theories of Elementary Particles". In:  Reviews of Modern Physics, volume 13, number 3, July 1941, occupying pp 203-232 in the issue containing pp 171-232.  Offered in the original printed wrappers.  Fine condtion.  $200