PAULI, W. JR.

Über das thermische Gleichgewicht zwischen Strahlung und freie Elektronen.

Berlin, Julius Springer, 1923. 8vo. Bound in contemporary half cloth with gilt lettering to spine. In "Zeitschrift für Physik", 17 & 18 band , 1923. Front board missing and spine and back board detached. Library stamp to title page. Internally a fine and clean copy. Pp. 272-286. [Entire volume: IV, 424, IV, 383 pp].

First printing of Pauli's important paper on the equilibrium between free electrons and radiation at a given temperature .
Pauli worked on the present paper while staying in Copenhagen and studying under Niels Bohr: "In Copenhagen Pauli had found some solace not so much by strolling in the beautiful streets as by thinking about problems other than the anomalous Zeeman effect. One problem in particular caught his interest during this time: The thermal equilibrium between radiation and free electron. It was motivated by the tremendous boost that the photon idea advanced by Einstein in 1905 received in 1923 when Arthur Holly Compton experimentally confirmed the relativistic kinematics for the scattering between a photon and a free electron at rest derived independently by himself and by Peter Debye." (Enz, No Time to be Brief: A Scientific Biography of Wolfgang Pauli, P. 99).

Order-nr.: 48978