RICHARD P. FEYNMAN'S SIGNED & ANNOTATED COPY OF MONK'S "LIGHT PRINCIPLES AND EXPERIMENTS", 1937.

8vo. 477 pp. Blue publisher's cloth; worn. SIGNED IN BLUE INK ON FLYLEAF, WITH THE CAPITAL LETTERS WRITTEN IN DOUBLE LINES "FEYNMAN, RICHARD P. / DEPT. OF PHYSICS / PRINCETON, UNIV." With a handful of text annotations and diagrams in his hand in pencil.

FIRST EDITION OF THIS EARLY WORK, LIKELY USED BY FEYNMAN TO TEACH AT CORNELL. Twenty-seven year old Feynman joined the faculty at Cornell in 1945, in order to be close to his dear friend Hans Bethe, whom he met while working on the atom bomb at Los Alamos. In the three years that transpired between obtaining his Ph.D. from Princeton, and joining Cornell, the young Feynman had experienced a great deal, spending an intense three years developing the atom bomb, with the first detonation of the bomb, the Trinity Test, occurring exactly one month after Feynman lost his beloved first wife Arline to tuberculosis. He had experienced a lifetime's-worth of stress and heartache in a short amount of time, and yet, as the style of hand-writing in this book would suggest, was still very much an innocent young man.