JF Ptak Science Books // Blog Bookstore

The Big Bang--Three Flavors of Gamow and Alpher, 1948

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

_____.  Another copy, bound in the Physical Review volume 73, April-June, 1948.  Fine copy in cloth, with the original front wrapper for April 1 (the Gamow issue) bound in (this is the only bound wrapper).  Fine copy all the way around.  $950

The Great Precursor to the 1948 Big Bang Theory

George Gamow.  "Expanding Universe and the Origin of Elements", in the Physical Review, volume 70, nos. 7 & 8, October 1 & 15, 1946, a short note it was but long on impact, pp 572-3.

Very good copy in the original wrappers.  $1000

This is the copy of Al Wattenberg,with his "A.W." at top right corner of the fron wrapper. 

"A student of Enrico Fermi’s, Al was a member of the team that built the first successful nuclear reactor under the stands of the University of Chicago stadium, leading to the first controlled nuclear chain reaction on December 2, 1942. Al was also one of the signatories of the “Szilard Petition” asking the President of the United States not to use the nuclear bomb without warning. After the war, he was among the founders and activists of the Federation of Atomic Scientists (now the Federation of American Scientists), believing that scientists had an ethical obligation to bring their knowledge and experience to bear on critical national decisions, particularly pertaining to the humanitarian uses of science and technology..."--University of Illinois, Urbana, Physics Deaprtment

Fotheringham,  John.  Ancient Chronology AND OTHER PAPERS.  Various publishers,  Fotheringham, J(ohn) K(night) (b.1874).

Several papers, including: Ancient Chronology. Offprint: Oxford Magazine, 1930, original printed wrappers.

Recorded Date of the Chinese Eclipse of -719. Offprint, Royal Astronomical Society, vol XC, #9, 2pp.

Herbert Hall Turner, 1861-1930. Offprint, Oxford Magazine, 1930, 4pp,

Seeing, Eyesight and Weather in Ancient Babylonia. Offprint, British Astronomical Association, volume 40, 1930;

Notes on Galactic Rotation, Offprint, Monthly Notices RAS, 1930.

All are very good, in original wrappers, and *signed by the author*.  Five offprints:  $250

Fotheringham (Lecturer at Kings College and by 1909 a Fellow of Magdalen; reader at U London, assistant at the Observatory at Oxford and reader of ancient astronomy and chronology at Oxford) was a distingusied researcher, lecturer and author in the classics and in ancient astronomy. The large majority of his 100+ papers (published in The Chaldean, Classical Quarterly, Journal Hellenic Studies, J. Philology) deal with ancient observations, including 29 papers to Monthly Notices RAS, 9 to Observatory, and 18 to Nature.     

George Ellery Hale, 15 Offprints

Hale,  George Ellery.  Collection of 15 offprints.  Various,  1902-1926.  15 offprints, as follows:

Hale. "Visual Observations of the Solar Atmosphere”, Offprint, Communications to the National Academy of Sciences, Carnegie Institution of Washington, Mount Wilson Observatory, #97, vol 12, pp 286-295, 1926. Fine. Signed “To Dr. T.R. Merton, with the regards of George E. Hale”. (Merton was an Oxfordian, and an independent scholar and (wealthy) gentleman working in astronomy and spectroscopy).

Hale (with George Luckey). “Some Vortex Experimetns Bearing on the Nature of Sun-Spots and Flocculi”, Offprint, Communications to the National Academy of Sciences, Carnegie Institution of Washington, Mount Wilson Observatory, #11, vol 1, 5pp, 1915. Fine.

Harlow Shapley series on Magnitudes in Star Clusters, 1916-1921

Harlow Shapley.  "Studies in Magnitudes in Star Clusters.." 1-4,(5) 6-13. All are offprints from the National Academy of Sciences, Proceedings, 1916-1921. All are fine. (I and II are bound together, in wraps, as issued.)  $450

All but #5 are in their original wrappers.  
Also #5 is parethetic because it looks like a simple extract but I am fairly well convinced it is not—it is shorter than the others by a little, but there are also some extracted wrapper offprints in this collection from NAS that are the same height as V but with their (shorter) wrappers.

Chandrasekhar and the Dynamics of Stellar Systems, 1939-1940

Chandrasekhar, S.  The Dynamics of Stellar Systems. In two parts:

(1)  "The Dynamics of Stellar Systems, I-VIII".  In; the Astrophysical Journal, volume 90, number 1, pp 1-155.  In the issue numbering pp 1-208.  In the original wrappers, removed from a larger bound volume. 

(2)  "The Dynamics of Stellar Systems, IX-XIV".   In:  the Astrophysical Journal, volume 92, number 3, pp 441-642.  In the original wrappers, removed from a larger bound volume.

This is I think about the longest two-part entry ever made in the Astrophysical Journal, and by the great Chandrasekhar, who entered a field, mastered it, wrote the definitive textbook on the subject, and then moved on to the next.  A splendid mind.   The pair, $250

Dorritt Hoffleit.  Two papers:

1) The Discovery and Exploitation of Spectroscopic Parallaxes.  Offprint:  Popular Astronomy, vol LVIII, Nos 9+10, Vol LIX,  November, December, 1950 and January 1951.  45pp.

2) The Quest for the Stellar Parallax.  Offprint: Popular Astronomy, vol LVII, No 6, June 1949.  14pp. 

Both printed wrappers.  Very nice copies.  $35

Shapley--the Great Debate and the Expanding Universe, 1921-1938

Three Papers by Harlow Shapley

(1) Harlow Shapley and Heber D. Curtis.  "The Scale of the Universe."  Separate printing, Bulletin of the National Research Council, Vol 2, part 3, number 11, May 1921.  Pp 171-217. Original printed wrappers.  A Good (and perhaps a Very Good) copy, pretty well read.

Full text of the report here.

A good explanation of the debate between Curtis and Shapley lives at the NASA site here:

"Although the `Great Debate' is important to different people for different reasons, it is a clear example of humanity once again striving to find its place within the cosmic order. In the debate, Shapley and Curtis truly argued over the ``Scale of the Universe," as the debate's title suggests. Curtis argued that the Universe is composed of many galaxies like our own, which had been identified by astronomers of his time as ``spiral nebulae". Shapley argued that these ``spiral nebulae" were just nearby gas clouds, and that the Universe was composed of only one big Galaxy. In Shapley's model, our Sun was far from the center of this Great Universe/Galaxy. In contrast, Curtis placed our Sun near the center of our relatively small Galaxy. Although the fine points of the debate were more numerous and more complicated, each scientist disagreed with the other on these crucial points."

"A partial resolution of the debate came in the mid-1920's. Using the 100 inch Hooker Telescope at Mount Wilson, then the largest telescope in the world, astronomer Edwin Hubble identified Cepheid variable stars in the Andromeda Galaxy (M31) . These stars allowed Hubble to show that the distance to M31 was greater than even Shapley's proposed extent of our Milky Way galaxy. Therefore M31 was a galaxy much like our own. In the 1930s, the further discovery of interstellar absorption combined with an increased understanding of the distances and distribution of globular clusters ultimately led to the acceptance that the size of our Milky Way Galaxy had indeed been seriously underestimated and that the Sun was not close to the center. Therefore, Shapley was proved more correct about the size of our Galaxy and the Sun's location in it, but Curtis was proved correct that our Universe was composed of many more galaxies, and that ``spiral nebulae" were indeed galaxies just like our own."

And what about the "great" part of this debate?  Well, it was, it just wasn't very well known outside academic circles, and certainly didn't take hold of the popular imagination of the time. So it really was a great debate--it was just quiet.

 

Shapley, Harlow (1906-1966). Two papers.

(2) On the Distribution of Galaxies.  Pp 389-393.

(3) 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.

$300 for the three.

Chandrasekhar and the Kerr Black Hole

JF Ptak Science Books

Six papers by Chandrasekhar on the Kerr black hole.  All are with wrappers front and back, five are in larger bound volumes.  All from Royal Society of London Proceedings, A, Mathematical and Physical Sciences.  All have ex-library markings.  All quite fine and fresh otherwise.  Includes the four parts of The gravitational perturbations of the Kerr black hole. All:  $210

1. Chandrasekhar. The Kerr metric and stationary axisymmetric gravitational fields.  Pp 405-420. 16 January 1978.
2. Chandrasekhar. The gravitational perturbations of the Kerr black hole I.  Pp 421-439 16 January 1978.
3. Chandrasekhar. The gravitational perturbations of the Kerr black hole. II. Pp. 441-465. 16 January 1978.   
4. Chandrasekhar. The gravitational perturbations of the Kerr black hole. III.  further Applications. Pp 425-451. 27 April 1979.   (Bound with  On the equations governing the perturbations of the Reissner-Nordstrom black hole." Pp 467-494)
5. Chandrasekhar. The gravitational perturbations of the Kerr black hole. IV.  Pp 475-484. 31 October 1980.  Printed wrappers.  Several ex-library marks two call  number stickers front and back wrappers. 
6. Chandrasekhar. On the reflexion and transmission of neutrino waves by a Kerr black hole.  Pp 325-338, 7 January 1977.

Chandrasekhar, S.  "On algebraically special perturbations of black holes." In: Proceedings of the Royal Society, Series A, #1802, 8 March 1984, volume 392.  Article occupies pp 1-13 int he issue of 1-245pp.  Original wrappers, ex-library, with stamps on front and back wrappers.  Nice copy for this.  $50

"Algebraically special perturbations of black holes excite gravitational  waves that are either purely ingoing or purely outgoing. Solutions, appropriate to such perturbations of the Kerr, the Schwarzschild, and the Reissner-Nordstrom black-holes, are obtaine in explicit forms by different methods. The  different methods illustrate the remarkable inner relations among  different facets of the mathematical theory. In the context of the  Kerr black-hole they derive from the different ways in which the  explicit value of the Starobinsky constant emerges, and in the context of the Schwarzschild and the Reissner-Nordstrom black-holes  they derive from the potential barriers surrounding them belonging to a special class."--from the Royal Society site