FIRST EDITION OF RICHARD FEYNMAN'S "VERY HIGH-ENERGY COLLISIONS OF HADRONS," THE FIRST APPEARANCE OF HIS INFLUENTIAL PARTON MODEL

FEYNMAN, Richard P. "Very High-Energy Collisions of Hadrons." IN: Physical Review Letters, Volume 23, Number 24, pp. 1415-1417. New York: American Physical Society, 1969. Quarto, staple-bound, original blue wrappers. $850.

First edition of the 1969 issue of the journal Physical Review Letters, containing the first appearance of Richard Feynman's influential Parton Model, used in the discussion of subatomic Hadrons.

Richard Feynman was an "American theoretical physicist who was widely regarded as the most brilliant, influential, and iconoclastic figure in his field in the post-World War II era. Feynman remade quantum electrodynamics—the theory of the interaction between light and matter—and thus altered the way science understands the nature of waves and particles. He was co-awarded the Nobel Prize for Physics in 1965 for this work, which tied together in an experimentally perfect package all the varied phenomena at work in light, radio, electricity, and magnetism. The other cowinners of the Nobel Prize, Julian S. Schwinger of the United States and Tomonaga Shin'ichiro of Japan, had independently created equivalent theories, but it was Feynman's that proved the most original and far-reaching. The problem-solving tools that he invented—including pictorial representations of particle interactions known as Feynman diagrams—permeated many areas of theoretical physics in the second half of the 20th century" (Britannica). This paper is the first appearance of what would be known as the Parton Model, used for analyzing high-energy hadron collisions. "Partons," Feynman's term for the constituent parts of hadrons that he was proposing theoretically rather than from experiment, are now recognized to be quarks and gluons, but Feynman's model remains essential for the conceptualizing of these particles. From the library of American physicist Edwin McMillan, with his address sticker at the Lawrence Radiation Laboratory at Berkeley on the rear cover. It was McMillan who recruited the young Feynman to work on the Manhattan project in 1943. McMillan is best known for being the first person to produce a transuranium element—Neptunium—in 1939, for which he received the Nobel prize in Chemistry in 1951.

Text fine, faint stain to front cover, two tiny chips to rear cover.