Item #757 The Positive Electron; The Physical Review, volume 43, second series, number 6, March 15. Carl Anderson.

The Positive Electron; The Physical Review, volume 43, second series, number 6, March 15

Lancaster: The American Physical Society, 1933. First Edition. Wrappers. 1st edition, the first appearance of Anderson’s Nobel Prize winning paper (Nobel in 1936) citing his discovery of the electron antimatter counterpart (positron) a particle with the same mass as an electron but with an opposite electrical charge (like men and women). Our book is the journal issue of The Physical Review, vol. 43, no. 6, Mar. 15, 1933, pages 491–494 (7 13/16” X 10 1/2”) in original wrappers, and it would be in very good condition except it is unhappily marred by 3, barely successful, attempts to punch 3 holes near the spine for securing it in a binder (it is reassuring for the rest of us to know that at least one physicist could not skillfully operate a hole punching device). It is not the later annual volume, or worse, the pages torn from it (don’t buy torn out pages). ABPC lists no auction sales since 1975, and though it’s not nearly that rare, it is not common either, even though we have 2 of them. good. Item #757

Antimatter had been predicted, in theory, 3 years earlier by Paul Dirac, but it was Carl Anderson who identified it and then photographed it (15 times) in cosmic rays and 4 of his photographic proofs are reproduced here to accompany the text. And to verify his discovery, Anderson devised a gamma ray experiment in which he created positrons (electron pairs). One (the “one” being “you” or “I” or even “we” or “they” in this grammatical incident) cannot overstate the impact of Anderson’s paper as the first proof of antiparticles (more recent observations have seen that black holes and neutron stars produce vast amounts of positron–electron pair plasmas in astrophysical jets).

Price: $900.00

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