“The quantum theory of radiation.” Offprint from The London, Edinburgh, and Dublin Philosophical Magazine, Vol. XLVII, May, 1924

1924. Contemporary plain wrappers. Ownership signature of G.E. Uhlenbeck (1900-1988), a distinguished theoretical physicist, perhaps most widely known for the discovery of electron spin, on front wrapper. First edition, offprint issue. The paper was published simultaneously in German in the Zeitschrift für Physik. This is the famous Bohr-Kramers-Slater (BKS) paper in which a new quantum theory of radiation is proposed. The Compton effect proved the existence of light quanta, the change in wavelength of x-rays scattered from a target at various angles. Bohr disputed Compton’s interpretation, and here argues that Compton’s observations could be explained by assuming that in interactions between atoms and radiation, energy is only statistically conserved.

The paper came about from correspondence between Kramers and Bohr (who had won the 1922 Nobel Prize in physics), and rejected the classical laws of electrodynamics, proposing a purely statistical approach. Although elements of what the authors proposed were later disproven, their primary position changed the approach to all study of atomic science that followed.

DSB, II, pp. 239-255.