Search Results: Authors starting with W from Atticus Rare Books

1st Edition. FIRST EDITIONS IN MINT CONDITION AND IN ORIGINAL WRAPS of Abraham Wald's seminal work on sequential tests of statistical hypotheses. Before Wald, the traditional style of statistical decision was to posit a hypothesis, make a predetermined number of measurements, then make a decision whether to accept or reject the hypothesis. Wald realized that this procedure is quite wasteful, and that many measurements could be saved if given the option to decide at every step whether to continue or stop the measurement process. "According to Wald, the resulting ‘sequential probability ratio test frequently results in a savings of about 50 percent in the number of observations over the most efficient test procedure based on a fixed number of observations" (Gass, An Annotated Timeline of Operations Research, 65). In these papers Wald, known now as "the father of sequential analysis and decision theory," first presents the theoretical foundations of the theory of sequential analysis. The ideas he put… Read More

Lancaster: American Physical Society, 1997. 1st Edition. FIRST EDITION IN ORIGINAL WRAPS OF A LENGTHY PAPER ASSESSING THE ‘FORTY YEARS OF PROGRESS' SINCE THE RELEASE OF BURBIDGE(S), FOWLER, & HOYLE'S SEMINAL 1957 PAPER "SYNTHESIS OF THE ELEMENTS IN STARS". Fifteen scientists contributed to the paper. First published in 1957 paper, Margaret Burbidge, Geoffrey Burbidge, and William Fowler's seminal paper "Synthesis of the Elements in Stars" "describes hydrogen and helium are formed in the interior of stars" (Daintith, Oxford Dictionary of Scientists, 268). The paper, widely considered "one of the most authoritative and comprehensive works of modern science" is so famous that it is commonly referred to simply as B2FH after the initials of its authors (ibid). B2FH is credited with originating what is now known as the theory of stellar nucleosynthesis. An often quoted statement of Carl Sagan, "We are all star stuff," is simply his paraphrase of this review paper's thesis (ibid). B2FH predicted the… Read More

Lancaster: American Physical Society, 1960. 1st Edition. Full volume with original wrappers bound in. FIRST EDITION IN ORIGINAL WRAPS OF WEBER'S INVENTION OF THE FIRST GRAVITATIONAL WAVES DETECTOR. Hamiltonian formulation of the equations of general relativity now known as ADM formalism. WEBER: "The detection of gravitational waves is sometimes described as the Holy Grail of Modern Physics" (Blair, Advances Gravitational Wave Detectors, xvi). Gravitational waves, or ripples in the fabric of spacetime, were first predicted by Einstein's 1916 general theory of relativity. In February 2016, the September 2015 detection of gravitational waves, waves first predicted by Einstein over a hundred years ago, was announced. "The saga of gravitational wave detection goes back a long way: Einstein believed they existed but thought they were not physically detectable. Eddington queried their existence: he suggested that ‘they travel at the speed of thought'. But in the 1950's Pirani, Feynman, Bondi and later… Read More

New York: AAAS, 2005. 1st Edition. FIRST EDITION IN ORIGINAL WRAPS of a significant paper by Webster et al. documenting a large and significant increase - more than 50% increase in both the frequency as well as the percentage of observed category -- of category 4 and 5 hurricanes for all global basins from 1970 to 2004. They report that these increases have taken place while the number of tropical cyclones and tropical cyclone days has decreased in all basins except the North Atlantic. "The largest increase occurred in the North Pacific, Indian, and Southwest Pacific Oceans, and the smallest percentage increase occurred in the North Atlantic Ocean" (Webster, 2005, 1844). CONDITION & DETAILS: New York: AAAS. Complete 1st edition in original wraps, complete. 8vo. The issue bears the address label of Gary L. Bennett. Bennett's work at the NASA, the DOE, and the Nuclear Regulatory Commission and at NERVA (Nuclear Engine for Rocket Vehicle Applications) is well-detailed on Wikipedia. Minor scuffing to the… Read More

Cambridge: The Royal Society, 1952. 1st Edition. STUDIES INTO THE PHYSICS AND BIOLOGY OF INSECT FLIGHT, HERE THE METABOLISM OF FLYING DESERT LOCUSTS. Weis-Fogh was the research assistant of the Nobel Prize winning physiologist August Krogh. Among other things, Weis-Fogh here proves "Some insects utilize more than one type of metabolic fuel during flight. Migratory locusts shift from carbohydrate (trehalose and glycogen) to lipid fuels during flights that last more than 30 minutes" (Weis-Fogh, 1952; Dudley, The Biomechanics of Insect Flight: Form, Function, Evolution, 169). Like Krogh, Torkel Weis-Fogh was Danish. His contributions to our understanding of insect flight have been of such import that his discovery of "the clap and fling mechanism used by very small insects" was later named the Weis-Fogh mechanism in his honor (Wikipedia). In this paper, Weis-Fogh studied the metabolism of flying desert locusts by direct analyses of the content of fat and glycogen in controls and in animals.… Read More

Harper & Brothers, 1937. 1st Edition. In November 1936, H.G. Wells delivered a lecture at The Royal Institution wherein her first presented the idea of a world encyclopedia. Following the lecture and also in 1936, Wells "issued a pamphlet of 32 pages entitled The Idea of a World Encyclopaedia" (Norman, History of Information). The first large publication of the lecture was appeared in the April 1937 issue of Harper's offered here. Wells begins by a statement on his preference for cohesive worldviews rather than isolated facts. Correspondingly, he wishes the world to be such a whole "as coherent and consistent as possible" (Harper's, p. 472). He believed that 20th century encyclopedias had "failed to adapt to both the growing increase in recorded knowledge and the expansion of people requiring information that was accurate and readily accessible. He [asserted] that these 19th-century encyclopedias continue to follow the 18th-century pattern, organization and scale" arguing that they were essentially… Read More

London: Richard and John Taylor, 1843. 1st Edition. FIRST EDITION IN ORIGINAL WRAPS OF WHEATSTONE'S EXPERIMENTAL VERIFICATION OF OHM'S LAW, including a practical and simple formula by which to calculate resistance and current according to Ohm's law. In 1843, English scientist Charles Wheatstone gave a Bakerian lecture publicizing his " experimental verification of Ohm's law, helping to make the law (already well known in Germany) more familiar in England. In the lecture he also described new ways of measuring resistances and currents, including the rheostat and the so-called Wheatstone bridge, originally invented by Samuel Christie" (Dictionary of Scientific Biography, XIV, 290). "A Wheatstone bridge is an electrical circuit used to measure an unknown electrical resistance by balancing two circuit paths in a "bridge circuit," one of which includes the resistance to be measured. In 1833, British scientist Samuel Hunter Christie presented a Bakerian Lecture to the Royal Society that contained a… Read More

1836. 1st Edition. FIRST EDITION OF WHEATSTONES INTRODUCTION OF "OPTICAL EMISSION SPECTROMETRY" [the modern term] as an alternative to flame spectroscopy for the identification of the composition of metals. In 1835 and in this paper "Charles Wheatstone reported that different metals could be distinguished by bright lines in the emission spectra of their sparks, thereby introducing an alternative to flame spectroscopy" (History of Spectroscopy and Emission Spectrum). In the mid-18th and early-19th centuries, Melvill, Herschel, and Talbot all experimented with the colors imparted to flames by salts and other materials. The studies of spark-and-arc-excited spectra by Wheatstone (offered here) and Foucault in 1848, however, "were the early beginnings of atomic emission and absorption" (Ihnat, Atomic Absorption, 129). In essence, their work on emission spectrometry as it is now understood involved the application of "electrical energy in the form of spark generated between an electrode and a metal… Read More

Lancaster: American Physical Society, 1955. 1st Edition. FIRST EDITION IN ORIGINAL WRAPS OF "THE FIRST REAL SEMINAL WORK ON THE SUBJECT" OF WORMHOLES (Ciufolini, General Relativity, 39). Wheeler's 1955 paper depicts the first diagram of a wormhole - the first diagram of a tunnel connecting one opening in one region of space to another opening in another region -- to appear in the literature of physics. The "first serious paper on wormholes was the 1935 paper by Einstein and Rosen. In this paper the authors used a term, ‘bridge,' for the description of the hypothetical objects" which Wheeler would later call ‘wormholes' (ibid). In this 1955 paper, Wheeler discusses wormholes as topological entities called ‘geons' -- short for ‘gravitational-electromagnetic entity'. He presents a geon a gravitational or electromagnetic wave bound together in a confined area "by the gravitational attraction of its own field energy" (Wikipedia). Today, "wormholes are generally understood as comparatively… Read More

1968. 1st Edition. FIRST EDITION IN ORIGINAL WRAPPERS OF THE 1st PRINTING OF THE JOHN WHEELER'S TERM "BLACK HOLE" - A PLACE IN SPACE WHERE GRAVITY PULLS SO MUCH THAT EVEN LIGHT CANNOT GET OUT. Wheeler first used the appellation in a lecture before the American Association for the Advancement of Science on December 29, 1967. The lecture was published in The American Scholar, offered here; it was also published concurrently in American Scientist. Despite how history has recorded the origin of the term, as Wheeler himself later wrote, the coinage of "black hole" was not entirely his own. "In the fall of 1967, [I was invited] to a conference ... on pulsars. ... In my talk, I argued that we should consider the possibility that the center of a pulsar is a gravitationally completely collapsed object. I remarked that one couldn't keep saying "gravitationally completely collapsed object" over and over. One needed a shorter descriptive phrase. "How about black hole?" asked someone in the audience. I had been… Read More

Paris: Mallet-Bachelier, 1863. 1st Edition. 1st EDITION OF WIBERG'S EXTENSIVE 1863 REPORT ON HIS MODIFICATION, PRAISED AS ‘INGENIOUS' BY THE FRENCH ACADEMY, OF THE SCHEUTZ DIFFERENCE ENGINE. ALSO, 1st EDITION OF THE NEURO RESEARCH & EXPERIMENTS WHICH LED TO SECHENOV'S PIONEERING BOOK ON CEREBRAL REFLEX ACTIVITY. ALSO, 1st EDITION OF KELLER & KELLER'S WAVE MODEL USING A LE SAGE TYPE MECHANISM IN COMBINATION WITH LONGITUDINAL WAVES OF THE AETHER. Martin Wiberg was a Swedish "computer pioneer" (Wikipedia). Interested in printing, he wanted to develop a ‘composing' machine. To raise funds to begin Wiberg "decided to publish a set of interest tables, hoping to use the machine of his compatriot Scheutz for computing and printing" (History of Computers Portal; Origins of Cyberspace 82). Scheutz's machine, however, had already been sold, so Wiberg set out to build his own calculating machine - one similar to Scheutz's but considerably smaller. Wiberg's machine had the same capacity as did Scheutz's -… Read More

Leipzig: Johann Ambrosius Barth, 1863. 1st Edition. FIRST EDITION, full bound volume, OF WIENER'S 1863 PAPER PROVIDING THE FIRST SCIENTIFIC ANALYSIS OF THE CAUSE OF BROWNIAN MOTION - THE FIRST QUALITATIVE IDENTIFICATION OF THE INTERNAL MOLECULAR CAUSE OF BROWNIAN MOTION. Information on Kirchhoff's solar spectral analysis paper - the last of three important ones -- appears further down. WIENER: While Brown suspected that the motion has biological causes, Wiener "relates Brownian motion to inherent fluctuations of the suspending fluid" and was the first to prove that Brownian motion is a consequence of the molecular movements of the liquid in question (Philipse, Brownian Motion, 12). Brownian motion is the random movement of particles suspended in a fluid (a liquid or a gas) caused by collisions with molecules of the fluid. It was one of the first indications of the existence of atoms and molecules. In 1863, about 36 years after Robert Brown first wrote about Brownian motion, the German… Read More

Berlin: Julius Springer, 1933. 1st Edition. FIRST EDITION OF A 1933 PAPER BY EUGENE WIGNER DESCRIBING THE SCATTERING OF PROTONS & NEUTRONS; THE PÖSCHL-TELLER POTENTIAL; & GUIDO BECK ON DIRAC'S HOLES THEORY. Full volume. Eugene Paul Wigner (1902-1995) was a Hungarian-American physicist, mathematician and engineer "who made a number of important proposals for how symmetries can be applied to the analysis of quantum mechanics" (History of Physics: The Wenner Collection). In 1963 he received half the Nobel Prize in Physics "for his contributions to the theory of the atomic nucleus and the elementary particles, particularly through the discovery and application of fundamental symmetry principles" (Nobel Prize Committee). In quantum mechanics, the scattering of particles is the principal tool by which the microscopic world can be investigated. In this paper, Wigner argues that "The scattering of neutrons on protons is calculated on the assumption that their interaction can be described by a potential… Read More

Berlin: Julius Springer, 1933. 1st Edition. FIRST EDITION IN ORIGINAL PAPER WRAPS OF A 1933 PAPER BY EUGENE WIGNER DESCRIBING THE SCATTERING OF PROTONS & NEUTRONS. Eugene Paul Wigner (1902-1995) was a Hungarian-American physicist, mathematician and engineer "who made a number of important proposals for how symmetries can be applied to the analysis of quantum mechanics" (History of Physics: The Wenner Collection). In 1963 he received half the Nobel Prize in Physics "for his contributions to the theory of the atomic nucleus and the elementary particles, particularly through the discovery and application of fundamental symmetry principles" (Nobel Prize Committee). In quantum mechanics, the scattering of particles is the principal tool by which the microscopic world can be investigated. In this paper, Wigner argues that "The scattering of neutrons on protons is calculated on the assumption that their interaction can be described by a potential that extends to only very small distances. This potential… Read More

London: Macmillian & Sons, 1951. 1st Edition. FIRST EDITION OF A NUMBER OF IMPORTANT PAPERS. ALSO INCLUDED: Armenteros, R.; Barker, K. H. "Decay of Neutral V-Particles" WITH Mackay, D. M., Calculating Machines and Human Thought WITH Bragg, W. L. Elimination of the Unwanted Image in Diffraction Microscopy WITH Martyn, D. G. The Theory of Magnetic Storms and Auroras. CONDITION & DETAILS: London: Macmillian & Sons. Complete volume. 4to (10.25.x 7.5 inches; 256 x 186mm). 1076 pp. & lv name and title index. Ex-libris bearing only discrete stamps on the flyleaf, pastedown and title page; no spine markings whatsoever. Bound in blue cloth, gilt-lettered at the spine. Solidly and tightly bound; light rubbing at the edges. Very clean inside and out. Very good condition.

London: Macmillan & Sons, 1967. 1st Edition. BOUND FIRST EDITION, full volume, of the first tentative measurement of a CMB anisotropy, a slightly elevated temperature in the direction of a known quasar cluster. Wilkinson & Partridge's paper presents results "which appear to set rather stringent limits on the magnitude of possible density inhomogeneities in the universe" (Wilkinson and Partridge, 1967, 719). ALSO included is Nicholas Shackleton's reassessment of Emiliani's conclusions from his 1966 analysis of the oxygen isotope ratios in Caribbean cores as an indicator of variations in total volume of glacier ice sheets. WILKINSON: "The CMB radiation is a direct relic of the early universe. It is a unique and deep probe of both the thermal history of the early universe and the primordial perturbations in the matter distribution" (Tuluie, "Cosmic Microwave Background" AJ, 1996, 15). Following "the discovery of the CMB, early work focused on putting constraints on the isotropy of the radiation field:… Read More

London: Macmillan Co, 1997. 1st Edition. Full volume. 1st EDITION WITH ORIGINAL FRONT WRAP PRESENT OF THE LANDMARK CLONING OF THE FIRST MAMMAL, DOLLY. NO ADDRESS LABEL. British biologists Sir Ian Wilmut and Keith Campbell announced the cloning of Dolly in this paper, the first account of their efforts and research. Considered one of the most significant scientific breakthroughs in history, Dolly's birth (and survival until 2003) proved that mammals could be cloned from adult somatic cells through the process of nuclear transfer - essentially, adult cells could reprogram themselves into a new being. "Working at the Roslin Institute [part of the University of Edinburgh] in the mid-1990s, Keith Campbell, a coworker of Wilmut's "found a way to turn back the clock of a mature, differentiated cell. He deprived cultured udder (mammary) cells from adult ewes of nutrients for five days, forcing the cells into a ‘sleeping' state in which many of their genes shut down. Wilmut and Campbell fused each… Read More

London: Macmillan, 1965. 1st Edition. FIRST EDITION IN ORIGINAL WRAPS of the last of four papers by John Tuzo Wilson providing evidence to buttress the idea of both transform faults and the Vine-Matthews hypothesis that the sea floor is spreading, here arguing "how mutually supportive these two concepts were" (Frankel, The Continental Drift Controversy, 294). Reinforcing this, Wilson's paper points "out the existence of submarine fracture zones, which transversely cut the oceanic ridges - the transform faults - showed large-scale deformation of the oceans along these narrow mobile belts that form a network between the rigid plates offsetting the ocean ridges as a result of differential movement of the plates" (Valdiya, Aspects of Tectonics, 81). [Note that we offer a number of other Wilson papers separately as well as the Vine-Matthews paper]. Wilson's contributions to the theory of plate tectonics "introduced to the mainstream the idea that continents and oceans are in continuous motion over our… Read More

London: Macmillan, 1965. 1st Edition. FIRST EDITION (full volume) OF JOHN TUZO WILSON'S 1965 GROUNDBREAKING INTRODUCTION OF THE CONCEPT OF THE TRANSFORM FAULT, THE PAPER THAT FOUNDED PLATE TECTONICS" (Dewey, Marking 50 Years of the Wilson Cycle, Geoscience Canada, 43, 2016, 283). "Whereas previous theories of continental drift had conceived of plates as either moving closer together (convergent plates) or further apart (divergent), Wilson asserted that a third kind of movement existed whereby plates slide past each other. This theory became one of the bases for plate tectonics, which revolutionized the geophysical sciences" (Encyclopedia Britannica). [Note that we offer other important Wilson papers separately]. Though Wilson wrote other papers of interest in 1962 and 1963, prior to 1965, he was "a staunch anti-drifter", meaning he didn't believe in continental drift. In 1965, Wilson began to tie "together many threads to create a cohesive paradigm that embraced continental drift, sea-floor… Read More

London: Macmillan, 1965. 1st Edition. BOUND FIRST EDITION (full volume) of the last of four papers by John Tuzo Wilson providing evidence to buttress the idea of both transform faults and the Vine-Matthews hypothesis that the sea floor is spreading, here arguing "how mutually supportive these two concepts were" (Frankel, The Continental Drift Controversy, 294). Reinforcing this, Wilson's paper points "out the existence of submarine fracture zones, which transversely cut the oceanic ridges - the transform faults - showed large-scale deformation of the oceans along these narrow mobile belts that form a network between the rigid plates offsetting the ocean ridges as a result of differential movement of the plates" (Valdiya, Aspects of Tectonics, 81). [Note that we offer a number of other Wilson papers separately as well as the Vine-Matthews paper]. Wilson's contributions to the theory of plate tectonics "introduced to the mainstream the idea that continents and oceans are in continuous motion over our… Read More