Odd Index
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For the physicist: light, atoms and stars

How physics and chemistry read the world by its light and its atoms, from a German handbook of spectroscopy to a Soviet monograph on thorium.

Publications of the Observatory of the University of Michigan, Vols. VI (1937), VII (1939), and VIII, No. 2, University of Michigan Observatory

Heinrich Kayser’s Handbuch der Spectroscopie was a great reference on spectroscopy and spectral measurement; this is its fifth volume, from 1910. The University of Michigan Observatory published its own research of the 1930s on stellar spectra, the Sun and its instruments. Francis Owen Rice and Edward Teller’s The Structure of Matter is a textbook on atomic and molecular structure, and a Soviet monograph on analysing thorium, a radioactive element important to nuclear and industrial research, reached English readers in 1969.

Handbuch der Spectroscopie, Fünfter Band, Heinrich Kayser
No. 0152 · 1910
The light that atoms give off, catalogued

The fifth volume of Heinrich Kayser’s handbook of spectroscopy, 1910.

Publications of the Observatory of the University of Michigan, Vols. VI (1937), VII (1939), and VIII, No. 2, University of Michigan Observatory
No. 0114 · 1937–1939; vol. VIII, no. 2 undated
Stars, read one spectrum at a time

The University of Michigan Observatory’s research of 1937–1939 on stellar spectra and the Sun.

The Structure of Matter, Francis Owen Rice and Edward Teller
No. 0166 · 1949; second printing April 1952
Atoms and molecules, as Edward Teller taught them

Francis Owen Rice and Edward Teller’s textbook, in its 1952 second printing.

Analytical Chemistry of Thorium, D. I. Ryabchikov and E. K. Gol'braikh
No. 0161 · 1969
How to measure thorium, from Russian into English

A Soviet monograph on a radioactive element, translated in 1969.

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Odd Index · written from the catalogue records
  • Every statement about a copy (stamps, inscriptions, condition, edition) comes from that copy’s own catalogue record and photographs; nothing is carried over from another copy.
  • Interpretations are labelled as interpretations. Background that the records do not contain has not been added.
  • Several readings here are tentative or carried over from earlier records (Carmichael, Howland, Havens, the Stately Game’s addressee); each is hedged in the text and flagged on the object page.

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