Search Results: Authors starting with L from Atticus Rare Books

Berlin: Julius Springer. 1st Edition. FIRST EDITION OF THE 2nd of a series of papers "IN WHICH [KOPFERMANN AND LADENBURG] PRESENTED THE FIRST EVIDENCE OF ‘NEGATIVE DISPERSION,' WHAT PHYSICISTS NOW CALL STIMULATED EMISSION" (James, 100 Years at the Intersection of Chemistry and Physics 86). "Some historians of science have even argued that with just a bit more luck Ladenburg and Kopfermann might have observed the first laser pulse" (James, 86). That might seem hyperbole. It isn't. To understand just how close the work in the papers offered here brought Ladenburg and Kopfermann: "One of the most important concepts necessary in understanding laser operation is the fact that quantization of energy in the atom results in discrete energy levels. In addition, transitions from one energy level to another must be possible in order for light emission to occur, and these transitions include both spontaneous and stimulated emission" (Parry-Hill et al, Spontaneous and Stimulated Process). The Ladenburg and… Read More

Berlin: Julius Springer, 1921. 1st Edition. FIRST EDITION OF THE "FIRST QUANTUM INTERPRETATION OF OPTICAL DISPERSION" (Taltavull, Rudolf Ladenburg and the First Quantum Interpretation of Optical Dispersion, Eur. Phys. J. H. 45, 123, 2020). "The problem of optical dispersion taught physicists important lessons about how to cross the boundary between classical and quantum physics in order to gain novel insights about quantum theory. The quantum reinterpretation of optical dispersion in 1921 [and put forth by Landenburg in this paper] was a fundamental step in this direction. Prior to Landenburg's paper, "optical dispersion had never been considered as a quantum phenomenon before" (ibid., 157). Theoretical physicists had tried to explain dispersion from the point of view of quantum theory ever since 1913 when Bohr proposed his quantum model of atom. But their theories proved unsuccessful. It was Ladenburg who provided the breakthrough toward a quantum understanding of dispersion. "Classically,… Read More

Lancaster: American Physical Society, 1947. 1st Edition. BOUND FIRST EDITION, FIRST ISSUE of the paper in which Lamb announced the fine structure of the hydrogen atom, discovered the discrepancy in electromagnetic theory called the Lamb Shift, and began the revolution that led to Quantum Electrodynamics (QED). Full volume with many other papers of significance throughout. QED basically describes how light and matter interact, addressing it as a small difference between energy levels of two orbitals of the hydrogen atom that was unexplained and at odds with prevailing electromagnetic theory, then Dirac's quantum theory of the electron. Lamb explains "electromagnetic attraction and repulsion... in terms of the exchange of photons between charged particles" (Peacock, The Quantum Revolution, 100). The Lamb Shift, then, is a small difference between energy levels of two orbitals of the hydrogen atom that was unexplained and at odds with prevailing electromagnetic theory, then Dirac's quantum theory of… Read More

Lancaster: American Physical Society, 1947. 1st Edition. FIRST EDITION, FIRST ISSUE IN ORIGINAL WRAPS of the paper in which Lamb announced the fine structure of the hydrogen atom, discovered the discrepancy in electromagnetic theory called the Lamb Shift, and began the revolution that led to Quantum Electrodynamics (QED). QED basically describes how light and matter interact, addressing it as a small difference between energy levels of two orbitals of the hydrogen atom that was unexplained and at odds with prevailing electromagnetic theory, then Dirac's quantum theory of the electron. Lamb explains "electromagnetic attraction and repulsion... in terms of the exchange of photons between charged particles" (Peacock, The Quantum Revolution, 100). The Lamb Shift, then, is a small difference between energy levels of two orbitals of the hydrogen atom that was unexplained and at odds with prevailing electromagnetic theory, then Dirac's quantum theory of the electron. This small difference, caused by the… Read More

Lancaster: American Physical Society, 1957. 1st Edition. FIRST EDITION IN ORIGINAL WRAPS of the existence of the KL Meson. The long-lived neutral kaon is called the KL ("K-long") and decays primarily into three pions. In particle physics, a kaon also called a K meson and denoted K is any one of a group of four mesons distinguished by the fact that they carry a quantum number called strangeness. In the quark model they are understood to contain a strange quark (or antiquark), paired with an up or down antiquark (or quark). CONDITION & DETAILS: Lancaster: American Physical Society 105, March 15, 1957. Very slight and small scuff on rear wrap; small spot on front wrap. Very good condition.

Paris: Gauthier-Villars, 1891. 1st Edition. FIRST EDITION IN ORIGINAL WRAPS OF A VERY EARLY PAPER ON AERONAUTICS. "As a result of his observations, Mr. Langley announced in 1891 that it was possible to construct machines which would give such a velocity to inclined surfaces that bodies indefinitely heavier than the air could be sustained upon it and moved through it with great velocity" (National Academy of Biographical Memoirs, Vol. VII, 252). Samuel Pierpont Langley was an astronomer and aeronautical pioneer known for his curious and expansive mind. In 1887 and while working at Pennsylvania's Allegheny Observatory, he built a large whirling table and began a series of experiments on ‘aerodynamics'. By later that same year, Langley was Assistant Secretary of the Smithsonian. Working with assistants at the institution, "in 1889 he tested stuffed birds on the whirling table; a frigate bird, a California condor and an albatross, with the result that none of them would lift as a live bird ought"… Read More

Paris, 1798. FIVE VOLUME FIRST EDITION SETOF LAPLACE'S FUNDAMENTAL WORK ON CELESTIAL MECHANICS & IN WHICH HE DEPICTS THE UNIVERSE AS A "GREAT SELF-REGULATING MACHINE" (Printing & the Mind of Man 252). First edition of one of the most important scientific works since Newton's "Principia." Five volumes bound as four - all first editions; all supplements present except the fifth. Includes folding plate in volume four. Laplace was the first to place astronomy on a modern mathematical footing, reformulating classical mechanics in terms of the calculus rather than the geometric constructions used by Newton. "Laplace's system of celestial mechanics (a term he coined) marked an advance over that of Newton, who had posited the necessity of a Deity in the universe to correct planetary irregularities; Laplace, on the other hand, when asked by Napoleon why his system contained no mention of the Creator, replied ‘I had no need of such a hypothesis'" (Norman, History of Science 1277). "Published over a… Read More

Manchester: Manchester Literary & Philosophical Society, 1908. 1st Edition. OFFPRINT, FIRST SEPARATE EDITION IN ORIGINAL PRINTED WRAPPERS OF JOSEPH LARMOR'S "EXTENSIVE SURVEY OF ATOMIC THEORY" (Kragh, Niels Bohr and the Quantum Atom, 111). Scarce with OCLC listing only two copies. The lecture was given on March 3rd, 1908 in receipt of the Wilde Medal the Manchester Literary and Philosophical Society. Joseph Larmor (1857-1942) was an Irish physicist and mathematician who made significant contributions in a wide variety of fields. Armor was "the first to calculate the rate at which energy is radiated by an accelerated electron, and the first to explain the splitting of spectrum lines by a magnetic field. His theories were based on the belief that matter consists entirely of electric particles moving in the ether" (Wikipedia). Larmor was awarded the Wilde Medal in recognition of the breadth of his understanding of and innovations in electricity, dynamics, chemistry, thermodynamics, and the… Read More

1897. 1st Edition. FIRST EDITION, OFFPRINT ISSUE, OF LARMOR'S FAMOUS PAPER INTRODUCING THE FIRST FORMULATION OF WHAT IS NOW KNOWN AS THE LORENTZ-TRANSFORMATION (or transformations), INCLUDING THE FIRST UNDERSTANDING AND PREDICTION OF THE CRUCIAL TIME DILATION & LENGTH CONTRACTION PROPERTIES INHERENT IN MAXWELL'S EQUATIONS. The transformation is "a general approach to how the distance and time measurements of two observers moving at different velocities can be transformed into each other's frames of reference" (History of Physics: The Wenner Collection). The offprint is housed in a custom leather clamshell case. This offprint is the important first announcement of Larmor's formulation and prediction. Later in the same year he developed his thoughts further those appeared in the Philosophical Transactions. To a collector, the announcement (particularly in offprint form) is the most desirable. "One of the interesting historical aspects of the modern relativity theory is that, although often regarded… Read More

New York: New York Times, 1936. 1st Edition. First edition of the March 7, 1936 issue of the New York Times, complete with "Certificate of Authentication" by the Historic Newspaper Archives. The certificate is #379913; it is signed and includes the seal of the archive. As the title implies, this article reports Einstein and Rosen's refutation of Ludwik Silberstein's public skepticism of Einstein's results, calculations, and processes of verification. " In 1935, following a controversial debate with Einstein, Silberstein published a solution of Einstein's field equations that appeared to describe a static, axisymmetric metric with only two point singularities representing two point masses. Such a solution clearly violates our understanding of gravity: with nothing to support them and no kinetic energy to hold them apart, the two masses should fall towards each other due to their mutual gravity, in contrast with the static nature of Silberstein's solution. This led Silberstein to claim that… Read More

Paris: De l'Imprimerie Royale, 1778. 1st Edition. FIRST EDITION, LAVOISIER'S OFFICIAL EASTER MEMOIR ON THE COMPOSITION OF AIR. In this work, Lavoisier proposed that ordinary air is composed of two different gases, one "highly respirable" (that he named "oxygen") and the other (later named nitrogen) that was unable to support combustion or respiration. This work is commonly referred to as Lavoisier's "Easter Memoir" because he presented an earlier version to the Academy around Easter of 1775; as this is the 1778 revised version, historians regard it as Lavoisier's "official" Easter Memoir (Wikipedia). We offer the 1780 edition separately. In April, 1778, "Lavoisier read for a second time the memoir in which he had originally demonstrated, in April 1775, that mercury precipitate reduced without charcoal disengages not fixed air, but the ‘air itself entire', or ‘the purest portion of the air'. He made some revisions in the text that have attracted widespread attention from historians" (Holmes,… Read More

Paris: Hotel de Thou, rue des Poitevins, 1780. LAVOISIER'S OFFICIAL EASTER MEMOIR ON THE COMPOSITION OF AIR. THIS IS THE 1780 edition. WE OFFER THE 1st 1778 EDITION SEPARATELY. In this work, Lavoisier proposed that ordinary air is composed of two different gases, one "highly respirable" (that he named "oxygen") and the other (later named nitrogen) that was unable to support combustion or respiration. This work is commonly referred to as Lavoisier's "Easter Memoir" because he presented an earlier version to the Academy around Easter of 1775; as this is the 1778 revised version, historians regard it as Lavoisier's "official" Easter Memoir (Wikipedia). In April, 1778, "Lavoisier read for a second time the memoir in which he had originally demonstrated, in April 1775, that mercury precipitate reduced without charcoal disengages not fixed air, but the ‘air itself entire', or ‘the purest portion of the air'. He made some revisions in the text that have attracted widespread attention from… Read More

FIRST EDITION OF THE 1892 PAPER IN WHICH LE CHATELIER DESCRIBES HIS INVENTION OF THE OPTICAL PYROMETER, an instrument that "provided the first reliable measurements of a number of temperatures of particular importance to science and industry" (DeWitt, Theory and Practice of Radiation Thermometry, 366). His invention measured temperature by comparing the light emitted from hot objects against a known standard; it was the first capable of measuring degrees of temperature over 3000 Celsius. Henri Louis Le Chatelier "based this instrument, a modified Cornu photometer, on a suggestion by Becquerel in 1863 that high temperatures be measured optically in terms of the brightness of thermal radiation. In this instrument, the spectral luminance of a target image is compared to that of the central portion of the flame of an oil lamp, both viewed through a red filter, and the luminance of the target image is adjusted by means of an iris diaphragm on the objective lens until the two images have equal spectral… Read More

New York: American Institute of Physics, 1972. 1st Edition. BOUND FIRST EDITION OF ANTHONY JAMES LEGGETT'S NOBEL PRIZE WINNING PAPER ON THE SUPERFLUIDITY OF HELIUM-3, "one of the holy grails of condensed matter physics" (Bishop, Recent Progress in Many-Body Theories, 4). Widely regarded as a world leader in low-temperature physics, in this paper Leggett "explains how atoms interact with one another in a superfluid"; specifically, he details "the anomalous superfluidity of helium-3...using the principles of quantum mechanics (Nndb). Leggett's work in this paper greatly advanced our understanding of how matter transitions from one phase to another (Rezende, Chronology of Science, 396). This volume also contains Osheroff, Richardson, Gully and Lee's Nobel Prize winning discovery of superfluidity in helium-3. In the 1920s, physicists discovered "that when isotopes of helium are cooled to extremely low temperatures they lose all viscosity, a property called superfluidity" (Rezende). Leggett's research… Read More

1964. Journal issue in original wrappers. After first demonstrating three dimensional holography in 1962, Emmett Leith & Juris Upatnieks were, in this paper, the first to introduce the possibility of using holograms to record three-dimensional (3D) objects as well as the first to describe how to realize multicolor wavefront reconstruction (holography). The journal is in its original wrappers and the paper is profusely illustrated with both photographs and technical figures. "Emmett and Upatnieks introduced display holography to the world in fall 1964" at the Optical Society of America (Emmett Leith, Inventor of Practical Holography). Their presentation demonstrated the possibility of recording transmission holograms of 3D objects... At the meeting, they introduced the off-axis reference beam technique and used it to display their hologram of a model railroad engine. This laser-illuminated hologram displayed a very realistic-looking 3D image [and] had a huge impact on the participants at the… Read More

Leipzig: Johann Ambrosius Barth, 1834. 1st Edition. BOUND FIRST EDITION OF THE FIRST APPEARANCE & FORMULATION OF LENZ'S 1833 LAW, stating that "The direction of current induced in a conductor by a changing magnetic field due to Faraday's law of induction will be such that it will create a field that opposes the change that produced it" (Lenz). Obeying both Newton's third law of motion and the conservation of energy, Lenz's law explains the physical meaning of the negative sign in Faraday's law. It was "the first explanation of the choice of sign in Faraday's law of induction and served as the basis for Helmholtz's proof of the law of conservation of energy for electromagnetic phenomena" (History of Physics: The Wenner Collection). At the beginning of the nineteenth century scientists were beginning to understand electricity and magnetism, but did not understand the relationships between the two. In this paper, Russian physicist Heinrich Friedrich Emil Lenz (1804-1865) took one of the first steps… Read More

London: J. Matthews. Small folio second edition, preferred and expanded, of Leybourn's important, detailed, and beautifully illustrated work on dialing. Leybourn's treatise (which is actually 14 treatises within one) is an extensive discussion of the fabrication of dials for a wide variety of different instruments. At publication in 1700, this volume was considered the most important work on dialing of its time, as well as the most extensive treatise of its kind in English. The history of dialing is discussed at length, as are the most minute details of construction, calculation, demonstration, and use. In addition to instructions on how to construct dials, Leybourn includes two chapters on reflex dialing by John Twysden and William Halton alongside other extensive commentary on dialing by Kircher, Maignan, Wells, and Samuel Foster. Additionally, Leybourn includes an extensive description and illustration of Francis Hall's elaborate and famous pyramid dial constructed at Whitehall. Hall's… Read More

Paris: Gauthier-Villars. 1st Edition. FOUR FIRST EDITIONS IN ORIGINAL WRAPS OF LIPPMANN'S MILESTONE SERIES OF PAPERS DESCRIBING HIS NOBEL PRIZE WINNING INVENTION OF "A METHOD OF REPRODUCING COLORS PHOTOGRAPHICALLY BASED ON THE PHENOMENON OF INTERFERENCE" Nobel Prize Committee). Lippmann's prize represents the only time this prestigious award has been given for a photographic invention. Gabriel Jonas Lippmann was a French scientist and a professor of mathematical physics at the Sorbonne. In the first paper offered here (February 2, 1891) Lippmann announced to the Academy of Sciences in Paris that he had succeeded in recording a true-color spectrum which was permanent. To do so, he employs the ‘interference principle' - a method based on silver chloride's optical reaction to light waves). A little more than one year later, on April 25, 1892 (offered here in the second paper), Lippmann gave a second presentation at the Academy of Sciences. This time he displayed four color photographs of different… Read More

Paris: Gauthier-Villars, 1891. 1st Edition. FULL VOLUME, FIRST EDITION, OF LIPPMANN'S FIRST IN A SERIES OF SEMINAL PAPERS DESCRIBING HIS NOBEL PRIZE WINNING INVENTION OF "A METHOD OF REPRODUCING COLORS PHOTOGRAPHICALLY BASED ON THE PHENOMENON OF INTERFERENCE" Nobel Prize Committee). Lippmann's prize represents the only time this prestigious award has been given for a photographic invention. Gabriel Jonas Lippmann was a French scientist and a professor of mathematical physics at the Sorbonne. In the paper offered here, Lippmann announced to the Academy of Sciences in Paris that he had succeeded in recording a true-color spectrum which was permanent. To do so, he employed the ‘interference principle' - a method based on silver chloride's optical reaction to light waves). Lippmann's technique, known as ‘interference photography' (also interferential photography or Lippmann photography), exploited the phenomenon of optical standing waves "by means of a mirror, and records these in a single-layer,… Read More

London: The Royal Society, 1944. 1st Edition. FIRST EDITION OFFPRINT IN ORIGINAL WRAPS OF A PAPER BY LITTLEWOOD ON INVARIANT THEORY. Offprints are prized because they are separately printed by journals and frequently issued in small quantities intended only for the author's use and distribution to colleagues. "Dudley Ernest Littlewood was a British mathematician known for his work in group representation theory. He worked on invariant theory and group representation theory, especially of the symmetric group, often in collaboration with Archibald Read Richardson of Swansea. They introduced the immanant of a matrix, studied Schur functions and developed the Littlewood-Richardson rule for their multiplication. Littlewood was also interested in the application of representation theory to quantum mechanics" (Wikipedia). CONDITION & DETAILS: Complete. 4to. (12 x 9 inches, 300 x 225mm). Original wraps with minor toning at the edges of the front wrap. Very slight chipping at the head of the spine. Bright… Read More