ANDERSON, H.L., Fermi, Long, Nagle. “ Total cross sections of positive pions in hydrogen.” Physical Review, volume 85/5, p. 936 (letter to the editor), 1952. Nice copy, few old ink smudges on front wrappers. Very good. Reproduced in full in Henry Stokes’ The Physical Review, the First Hundred Years, a Selection of Seminal Papers and Commentaries (1995). $175

_____. Another copy, original wrappers, removed from larger bound volume. $100

ANDERSON, H. L., E. Fermi, and Leo Szilard, “Neutron Production and Absorption in Uranium”, Physical Review. Volume 56, Issue 3, 284 – 286 (1939). Very good copy in the original wrappers with a bit of a red splotch on the wrapper spine being the result of an odd de-accessioning process.  About a VG copy.  $200

BRUCHE, Ernst & W. Henneberg.  Geometrische Elektronenoptik. Berlin, Springer:  1936.  8vo, pp. 366-419.  Offprint:  Ergebnisse derExaktenn Naturwissenschaften.  Wrappers, holes punched for a two-ring binder.  Good.  $95  
First printing, with a very interesting association:  signed “vom verfass.”to Dr. L. Marton”–all parties involved were working on the birth of the electron micoscope!  Bruche and Henneberg  continue on–in this and subsequent papers–to work out the associated problems of electron optics.

J.J. Thomson. “Ionization by Moving Electrified Particles”. in The London, Edinburgh and Dublin Philosophical Magazine…, Sixth Series, Vol. 23, No. 136, April 1912, double number, the article occupying pp 449-458 in the issue of pp 449-688. The (highly cited, 440+) issue offered in the original wrappers. Also includes some significant work by murders’ row of great physicists O.W. Richardson, George von Hevesy, Karl T. Compton, William H. Bragg, H.A. Wilson, , C.G. Darwin, Norman Campbell, among others.  Very nice copy, with some chipping along the edges of the spine top and bottom. $350

“Ionization by Moving Electrified Particles”, JJ Thomson. “A theoretical paper developing a theory based on the following assumptions: Cathode or positive rays when they pass through an atom repel or attract the corpuscles in it and thereby give kinetic energy to them. When the energy imparted to a corpuscle is greater than a certain definite value the value required to ionize the atom a corpuscle escapes from the atom producing a free corpuscle and positively charged atom. Philos Mag April 1912.”  in Electrical World, May 11, 1912

“Three characteristics of these Applications  [of Dynamics to Physics and Chemistry, 1888] deserve notice. For one, Thomson shows himself a master of the literature, not excluding the pertinent papers of German experimentalists. He was to keep fully abreast of the journals (from which he sometimes took ideas whose origin he later forgot) until World War  I… Second, the moderate phenomenology of the Applications, a work which eschews the specification of dynamical processes, recurs in much of Thomson’s later work. His pioneering theory of the conduction of electricity in gases, for example, merely assumes the existence of ions, and describes their behavior not in terms of the electrodynamics of their interactions, but via parameters–especially measures of mobility and recombination–to be fixed by experiment. Only later [the paper offered here] did he sketch a theory of the process of ionization.”–Dictionary of Scientific Biography

HUGHES, D.J. “Radiative Capture Cross Sections for Fast Neutrons”, in Physical Review, volume 70, numbers 1 & 2, July 1 & 15, 1946. Original wrappers. Very Good copy.  pp 106-7. (Al Wattenberg’s copy, with his “A.W.” at top right corner of the front wrapper.) $250

PJE Peebles writes (in his “Discovery of the hot Big Bang: What happened in 1948” published in he European Physical Journal H, 2014, Vol. 39,Issue 2, pp. 205 – 223): “Kragh (1996) reports that Alpher attended a talk by…Hughes at a meeting of the American Physical Society (June 20-22 1946) on capture cross section measurements [and published as the paper offered above in the PR], which led him to Hughes’ declassified document on measurements that used ‘1-MeV pile neutrons’… This is Alpher’s most important source of data on neutron capture cross sections…”

Peebles establishes eleven major papers in the history of the hot Big Bang, and the Alpher 1948 paper resulting from his long work and his exposure to the Hughes’ data is the first of these eleven. (On those eleven papers Peebles states that “The idea that the universe is filled with the thermal radiation now termed the Cosmic Microwave Background was discussed in eleven publications in the year 1948. These papers offer a detailed example of the process of development of a new and now very productive line of research, and of the confusion that can attend new ideas…”)

Kragh writes on the use of the Hughes data by Alpher that “…Alpher came to think of…their use, not in nuclear reactor design, but in the design of the universe. When Alpher studied the data he saw in them a key to understanding the cosmic distribution of the elements.” —Helge Kragh , Cosmology and Controversy: The Historical Development of Two Theories of the Two Theories, .p 112

Dirac, P.A.M. “Quantum Theory of Localizable Dynamical Systems”, American Physical Society, in the Physical Review, 73/9, 1 May 1948. Original printed wrappers. Very good condition.  $175

Abstract from AIP’s great PROLA website: “A dynamical system is called localizable if its wave functions can be expressed in terms of variables, each referring to physical conditions at only one point in space-time. These variables may be at points on any three-dimensional space-like surface in space-time. A general investigation is made of how the wave function varies when the surface is varied in any way. The variation of the wave function is given by equations of the Schroedinger type involving certain operators Hn(u) which play the role of Hamiltonians. The commutation relations for these operators are obtained. The theory works entirely with relativistic concepts and it provides the general pattern which any relativistic quantum theory must conform to, provided the dynamical system is localizable.”

“Dirac was also original in his conception of the role of probability in quantum mechanics. He thought that probabilities entered into the description of quantum phenomena only in the determination of the initial state (still described in terms of p’s and q’s), and not necessarily in the behavior of an isolated system. But, as Bohr had said at the Solvay Conference in 1927, isolated systems were unobservable. Dirac then assumed that the state of the world was represented by its wave function Ψ and that it changed abruptly during a measurement, whereupon “nature made a choice.”– Complete Dictionary of Scientific Biography, vol. 17, Charles Scribner’s Sons, 2008, pp. 224-233.

Also in the same issue are papers by Eugene Wigner, Aage Bohr, G.T. Seaborg (“Skaborg” on the table of contents!) “Nuclear Properties of  93^{237 “}(which appears in Seaborg’s collected papers book, Modern Alchemy as paper #le)