WU, C.S. [Chien-Shiung].
Beta Decay.
New York, Interscience Publishers, a division of John Wiley & Sons, 1966.
Chien-Shiung Wu (1912-1997), one of the foremost experimental physicists of the 20th century, grew up in China and attended a school founded by her father, a supporter of women's education. She completed her PhD at Berkeley in 1940, and in 1944 joined the Manhattan Project at Columbia University.
After the war, Wu was appointed to the Columbia faculty and began doing important work on beta decay, the process by which the nucleus of one radioactive element changes into another. 'In 1956, she was approached by theoretical physicists Tsung Dao Lee and Chen Ning Yang who knew about her expertise in beta decay. They asked her to devise an experiment to prove their theory that the law of conservation of parity did not hold true during beta decay. The law of parity states that all objects and their mirror images behave the same way, but with the left hand and right hand reversed. Wu's experiments, which utilized radioactive cobalt at near absolute zero temperatures, proved that identical nuclear particles do not always act alike'. (Atomic Heritage Foundation biography).
'After this major success, Wu began a new series of experiments on beta decay. She was searching for confirmation or violation of conservation laws, After devising tedious, delicate experiments, Wu's results helped destroy what had previously been considered a law of nature. Lee and Yang won the 1957 Nobel Prize for Physics for originating the idea, although Wu and many others thought she should have shared the honor' (Ogilvie, Biographical Dictionary of Women in Science, p. 1410).
First edition, first printing; 8vo; diagrams within the text; original buff cloth, titles to spine and upper board in blue, an excellent copy in the lightly rubbed jacket with a short split at the head of the spine panel; 394pp.
Stock code 124130
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Beta Decay.
MANN, W.B.
The Cyclotron.
1940
First edition of the first conventionally published book on the Berkeleye cyclotron, by Wilfrid B. Mann, a student of Ernest O. Lawrence.
$1,708.00
[SANDAGE, Allan] HARRISON, Stephen.
Emanational Physics.
1988.
The second edition of Emanational Physics, a rare and unusual self-published text by Stephen Harrison proposing to correct the field of physics by reframing it metaphysically.
$1,708.00
OPPENHEIMER, Robert; SERBER, Robert; SNYDER, Hartland.
'The Production of Soft Secondaries by Mesotrons'
January 15, 1940.
First edition of production of Soft Secondaries by Mesotrons by Robert Oppenheimer, a significant early work in particle physics and the path to the discovery of the pion and muon.
$684.00
