Introduction to Quantum Mechanics with Application to Chemistry.

The great educator teaches himself quantum mechanics. First edition, Richard Feynman's own copy, from which he taught himself quantum mechanics while an undergraduate at MIT. With his ownership inscription, pencilled notes on five pages of the text, and hand-drawn bookplate (not by Feynman, but possibly by his beloved first wife, Arline Greenbaum, who was interested in art).

Feynman entered MIT during the autumn of 1935 when quantum mechanics was a new field, 'so much more obscure even than relativity'. There was not yet a course he could take, though he and a friend, T.A. Welton, were 'desperately eager to be at the front edge of physics'. As a teenager Feynman had already taught himself advanced mathematics, so 'with the guidance of just a few texts' the two young men 'embarked on a program of self-study' (Gleick, Genius, p. 74). 'Their collaboration began in one of the upstairs study rooms of the Bay State Road fraternity house and continued past the end of the spring term... They filled a notebook, mailing it back and forth, and in a period of months they recapitulated nearly the full sweep of the 1925-27 revolution' in quantum theory (Gleick, pp. 74-77). Feynman also wrote in the books he used, and this one includes significant pencilled notes and equations, with around five examples in his hand and others in Welton's.

The author of the present text, Linus Pauling, was one of the founders of quantum chemistry and a two-time Nobel laureate. Introduction to Quantum Mechanics, which had only just been published when Feynman obtained this copy, was based on a series of lectures Pauling presented in 1930, and which had been attended by Einstein. It is now considered a classic in the field.

Feynman would go on to earn a PhD in physics at Princeton, work on the Manhattan Project, and make important contributions to particle physics, superfluidity, and quantum electrodynamics for which he was awarded the joint Nobel Prize in physics in 1965, but is popularly remember for the best-seller Surely You're Joking Mr Feynman! and his introductory textbook Lectures on Physics, which led to his nickname 'The Great Educator'. The present volume is an evocative and historically significant record of his process for educating himself in the most cutting-edge science of the period.

First edition; diagrams & equations within the text, pencilled notes on eleven pages and Feynman's bookplate and ownership inscription to the front pastedown, printed telephone message slip on yellow paper loosely inserted at p. 210, contents faintly toned; original blue cloth, titles to spine gilt, housed in a custom folding case, cloth rubbed with wear at the corners and ends of spine, joints and ends of spine professionally conserved, otherwise very good; 468pp.