Haarlem, Les Héritiers Loosjes, 1887. 8vo (23.6 x 14.9 cm). vi, 492 pp.; eight plates (several with mounted phototype prints, or in chromolithography). Original printed wrappers.

A rare complete copy – in original wrappers – of Volume 21 of the Archives Néerlandaises des Sciences exactes et naturelles, with Nobel Prize winner Anton Lorentz's important paper on the aberration of light, in which he concluded that Fresnel's theory should be preferred over Stokes's, and he formulated a new theory, replacing Stokes's, based on the famous Michelson-Morley experiment (see DSB). Lorentz's paper occupies pp. 103-176. Hendrik Antoon Lorentz (1853-1928) "...was a Dutch physicist who shared the 1902 Nobel Prize in Physics with Pieter Zeeman for the discovery and theoretical explanation of the Zeeman effect. He also derived the transformation equations underpinning Albert Einstein's theory of special relativity. ... In 1905, Einstein would use many of the concepts, mathematical tools and results Lorentz discussed to write his paper entitled On the Electrodynamics of Moving Bodies, known today as the theory of special relativity. Because Lorentz laid the fundamentals for the work by Einstein, this theory was originally called the Lorentz-Einstein theory" (Wikipedia). Uncut. Unmarked. Minimal chipping to the edges and lower outer corners of both wrappers. A very good, clean copy. DSB 8, p. 493.