JF Ptak Science Books Post 1900
As I've written about on this blog before, Blank, Empty, Blank and Missing Things can be of great importance. For example, if human conversation wasn't mostly filled with nothing, it would be difficult for us to process anything, everyone sounding like several mockingbirds calling away at once, all of the time. Music would be difficult if there were no silent interludes. And of course since existence is made up vastly of nothingness, to have it be filled would present a, um, problem. It also might be interesting to invent an 18th century board game based on the discovery of nothing through the ages...or maybe 16th century, when the idea of zero in mathematics was first coming into widespread use.
My interest in Nothing today comes along with design and epochal scientific publications--or at least highly significant appearances of great ideas. Sometimes the typography and design of the title pages of Great Works turn out to be very surprising--and sometimes that surprise in blankness is an unintentional result.
Also we'll just discuss relatively recent works of the past 150 years or so. Design changes quite a bit from the 18th to the 19th century so far as scientific and technical title pages go--the earlier design (and particularly the illustrated versions) are another matter.
First, the intentional bits, like this fine example of Niels Bohr's superb introduction to the rest of the world of modern atomic theory (based upon the Rutherford model and Planck's quantum theory), "On the Constitution of Atoms and Molecules" (in the Philosophical Magazine for July 1913). In this case (which actually is a three-part paper), the offprint to the publication has an upper part that is blank because it excludes the closing paragraphs of the preceding article--offprints being the separately-published and bound author's article that were meant to be distributed privately and prior to publication of the appearance of the contribtution in the journal.
Before I proceed though perhaps it would be interesting to see an attempt at anti-nothingness in design, which in many cases can be a work of high design art in themselves. For example, even though most of the white page is filled up,
this is still somehow quite balanced and pleasing. (Otto Hahn and Fritz Strassmann delivered a series of eleven seminal papers from 1933 to 1939, this being one of the most important, signaling the discovery of nuclear fission, an event that started its own sort of chain reaction in physicists who awoke with the sudden realization of how very doable all of this was, and how close so many other scientists were to having discovered this themselves.)
The title page for Marie Curie's great (and wrist-bending thousand-page) treatise, Traite de Radioactivite (Paris, 1910), which was a monumental survey of he field that she basically started thirteen years earlier, seems as though it is rather filled-up, but really is hardly so:
H.D. Smyth's classic work establishing the guidelines of what could and couldn't be said about making the atomic bomb and the distribution of sensitive information also is somewhat deceiving spatially--it seems as though the page is filled, but it really isn't:
(The somewhat misunderstand Leslie Groves was at first against publishing the extent of information conceived, but then rapidly swung around to the project, which was a big deal as he was the nominal man-in-charge of the Manhattan Project.)
But getting back to blank spaces and following up on the Bohr publication, there is this very fine example from Ernest Rutherford's Radio-Activity (the first edition of Cambridge, 1904):
Here's another: this is Francis Aston's (1877-1945) book which is basically the beginning of nuclear medicine. It is based upon the work of Frederick Soddy (who introduced the term "isotopes") and J.J. Thomson:
And an example that is both cluttered/filled and blank, there is Paul Rescalli & Pierre-Albert Balestrini, Nouvelle emthode pour installer et isoler parfaitement les fils conducteurs des telegraphes electriques (1850). This work doesn't nearly come into the same sphere of importance as the others mentioned here, but it was a significant thing, discussing a principal concern in tlegraphy, which was shielding the wires. Still, the title page is unusual in the world of blankness in title pages:
There is of course the perfectly reasonable, semi-filled-up title of a paper, as classically seen in offprints from the Annalen der Physik, in this case with Max Planck's famous quantum theory paper of 1900; full but yet not so, with just enough blankness to make the whole assembly a pleasure:
Which is a breakaway from the earlier-published works by Planck with the publisher Theodor Ackermann (of Munich):
All of which are far away from Hermann Minkowski's dissertation:
Perhaps this is the basis for an installment in this blog's Alphabet section, pursuing one representative of blank spaces in the title pages of famous scientific and medical papers.
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