Physics Timeline
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1745
Feb 18, Count Alessandro Giuseppe Antonio Anastasio
Volta (d.1827), Italian physicist, inventor (battery), was born.
(AHD, 1971
p.1436)(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alessandro_Volta)
1752 Jun 10, Benjamin Franklin's
kite was struck by lightning as he flew it during a thunderstorm [see
May 10, Jun 15].
(SFC, 6/10/09, p.D8)
1800 Alessandro Volta (1745-1827),
Italian physicist, first demonstrated the electric pile or battery.
(V.D.-H.K.p.269)(Econ, 3/8/08, TQ p.22)
1821 Thomas Johann Seebeck
(1770-1831), Estonia-born German physicist, discovered that applying a
temperature difference across two adjoined metals would give rise to a
small voltage. This came to be called the Seebeck effect.
(Econ, 9/6/08, TQ p.6)
1827 Mar 5, Alessandro Volta
(b.1745), Italian physicist who made 1st battery (1800), died.
(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alessandro_Volta)
1843 Sep 19, Gustave-Gaspard
Coriolis (b.1792), French engineer and mathematician, died. He showed
that the laws of motion could be used in a rotating frame of reference
if an extra force called the Coriolis acceleration is added to the
equations of motion.
(www.gap-system.org/~history/Mathematicians/Coriolis.html)
1853 German physicist Heinrich
Magnus (1802-1870) first described the phenomenon, which came to be
called the Magnus effect, whereby a spinning object flying in a fluid
creates a whirlpool of fluid around itself, and experiences a force
perpendicular to the line of motion and away from the direction of
spin. According to author James Gleick (b.1954) Isaac Newton described
it and correctly theorized the cause 180 years earlier, after observing
tennis players in his Cambridge college.
(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Magnus_effect)
1859 Gaston Plante, French
physicist, invented the first rechargeable battery.
(Econ, 3/8/08, TQ p.23)
1877 Sep 11, James Jeans (d.1946),
English physicist, mathematician and astronomer, was born. He was the
first to propose that matter is continuously created throughout the
universe.
(HN, 9/11/00)(www.britannica.com)
1902 Apr 20, Radium was isolated
as a pure metal by Curie and André-Louis Debierne through the
electrolysis of a pure radium chloride solution. Pierre and Marie Curie
had discovered the element in 1898.
(AP, 4/20/97)(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radium)
1892 Sep 10, Arthur Compton,
physicist, was born in Wooster, Ohio.
(HN, 9/10/00)
1905 Einstein presented his theory
of relativity declaring that the very measurement of time intervals is
affected by the motion of the observer. He proposed that light is
itself quantized, or particle-like, to explain how electrons were
emitted when light hit certain metals. He presented four papers, the
first on Brownian motion, the second was on the composition of light,
the third proposed the Special Theory of Relativity, and the fourth
established the equivalence of mass and energy. Einstein presented 5
papers this year, one of which was titled “Does the Inertia of a Body
Depend on its Energy Content?” This paper provided an incomplete proof
of E=mc2, an equation that had already been know for a few years. In
2008 Hans C. Ohanian authored “Einstein’s Mistakes: The Human Failings
of Genius.”
(NH, 3/05,
p.72)(www.aip.org/history/einstein/great1.htm)(WSJ, 9/5/08, p.A13)
1914 Sep 7, James Alfred Van
Allen, physicist, was born in Mt. Pleasant, Iowa. He discovered and
named the two radiation belts surrounding the Earth.
(HN, 9/7/98)
1921 Apr 2, Einstein (1879-1955)
made his first visit to the US on a fundraising tour with Zionist
leader Chaim Weizman. Prof. Albert Einstein lectured in NYC on his new
theory of relativity. In 2007 Jurgen Neffe authored “Einstein: A
Biography;” and Jozsef Illy edited “Albert Meets America.”
(SSFC, 5/13/07,
p.M6)(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Albert_Einstein)
1922 Carl Wieselsberger, German
physicist, described a method of suspending models on an airstream,
i.e. the ground effect.
(Econ, 9/8/07, TQ
p.12)(http://naca.central.cranfield.ac.uk/citations/cit.html)
1927 Mar, J.W. Dunne (1875-1949),
Irish engineer and author, published his essay “An Experiment with
Time” on the subjects of precognition and the human experience of time.
His theory suggested that in reality all time is eternally present,
that is, that past, present and future are all happening together in
some way. Human consciousness, however, experiences this simultaneity
in linear form. It was very widely read, and his ideas were later
promoted by several other authors, in particular by J. B. Priestley.
Other books by J. W. Dunne are The Serial Universe, The New
Immortality, and Nothing Dies.
(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/An_Experiment_with_Time)
1929 Ernest Lawrence invented the
cyclotron at UC Berkeley.
(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cyclotron)
1930 Physicists in Germany
discovered the neutron. Walther Bothe and Herbert Becker described an
unusual type of gamma ray produced by bombarding the metal beryllium
with alpha particles. James Chadwick recognized that the properties of
this radiation were more consistent with what would be expected from
Ernest Rutherford's neutral particle. The subsequent experiments by
which Chadwick proved the existence of the neutron earned him the 1935
Nobel Prize in physics.
(ON, 8/09,
p.7)(www.hps.org/publicinformation/ate/q609.html)
1931 Ernest Lawrence tested the
first cyclotron at UC Berkeley, Ca. The device measured 30cm in
circumference.
(Econ, 9/13/08, p.87)
1939 Jan 25, The cyclotron of
Nebraska-born nuclear physicist John R. (Ray) Dunning (31) produced
nuclear fission for the first time in America in Room 128 of Columbia
University's Pupin Physics Laboratory. Eugene T. Booth was a member of
the experimental team which conducted the first nuclear fission
experiment in the US; the other members of the team were Herbert L.
Anderson, John R. Dunning, Enrico Fermi, G. Norris Glasoe, and Francis
G. Slack.
(www.enotes.com/peoples-chronology/year-1939/science)
1939 Aug 2, Albert Einstein signed
a letter to President Roosevelt urging creation of an atomic weapons
research program.
(HFA, ‘96, p.36)(AP, 8/2/97)
1942 Sep 17, US Army Lt. Gen.
Leslie R. Groves (1896-1970) made a temporary Brigadier General and was
placed in charge of the Manhattan Engineer District, which became known
as the Manhattan Project, the fledgling US atomic bomb program.
(ON, 8/09,
p.7)(http://unjobs.org/authors/leslie-r.-groves)
1942 Dec 2, A self-sustaining
nuclear chain reaction was demonstrated for the first time at the
University of Chicago. On the squash court underneath a football
stadium of the University of Chicago, the first nuclear chain reaction
was set off. At 3:45 p.m., control rods were removed from the "nuclear
pile" of uranium and graphite, revealing that neutrons from fissioning
uranium split other atoms, which in turn split others in a chain
reaction. The reaction was part of the Manhattan Project, the United
States' top-secret plan to develop an atomic bomb. The group of
scientists was led by Enrico Fermi and they proved that building an
atomic bomb would be feasible. Dr. Alexander Langsdorf was one of the
designers of the first 2 nuclear reactors that followed the first
sustained nuclear chain reaction at the Univ. of Chicago. The first and
last atomic bombs ever used in war were dropped on Japan in 1945.
(TMC, 1994, p.1942)(SFC, 5/26/96, p.C-10)(AP,
12/2/97)(HNPD, 12/2/98)
1943 Jan 7, Nicola Tesla (b.1856),
Croatian born inventor and physicist, died In NYC. In 1996 Marc Seifer
authored “Wizard: The Life and Times of Nikola Tesla: Biography of a
Genius.”
(SFC, 12/29/96, Z1
p.2)(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nikola_Tesla)(WSJ, 3/7/09, p.W8)
1943 Jan, Construction began at
Los Alamos, New Mexico, on a research facility for the Manhattan
Project, the US atomic bomb program.
(ON, 8/09, p.8)
1943 The Hanford nuclear
reservation was constructed in Washington state for the Manhattan
Project. Hanford made plutonium until the 1980s.
(SFC, 4/10/99, p.A7)
1951 Apr 26, Arnold Sommerfeld
(b.1868), German theoretical physicist, died. He pioneered developments
in atomic and quantum physics. His atomic model permitted the
explanation of fine-structure spectral lines.
(www.absoluteastronomy.com/topics/Arnold_Sommerfeld)
1955 Apr 18, Albert Einstein (76),
physicist, died in Princeton New Jersey. Dr. Thomas Harvey, chief
pathologist at Princeton Hospital, performed Albert Einstein’s autopsy.
He removed the brain and took it home. In 2000 Michael Paterniti
authored "Driving Mr. Albert: A Trip Across America with Einstein’s
Brain." In 1999 it was reported that Einstein’s inferior parietal lobe
was larger than normal. In 2000 Amir D. Aczel published "God's
Equation: Einstein, Relativity, and the Expanding Universe." [see Apr
15] In 1983 Abraham Pais (d.2000 at 81) authored "Subtle Is the Lord:
The Science and the Life of Albert Einstein." In 2000 Dennis Overbye
authored "Einstein In Love," on Einstein’s 1st marriage with Mileva
Maric. In 2002 Fred Jerome authored "The Einstein File: J. Edgar
Hoover’s Secret War Against the World’s Most Famous Scientist." In 2007
Walter Isaacson authored “Einstein: His Life and Universe;” Jurgen
Neffe authored “Einstein: A Biography;” and Jozsef Illy edited “Albert
Meets America,” a chronicle of Einstein’s first visit to the US (1921)
on a fundraising tour with Zionist leader Chaim Weizman.
(AP, 4/18/97)(SFC, 6/18/99, p.A18)(SFEC, 1/9/00, BR
p.4)(SFC, 8/1/00, p.B2)(WSJ, 10/20/00, p.W10)(SSFC, 3/18/01, BR
p.6)(SFC, 9/15/02, p.M5)(WSJ, 4/6/07, p.B3)(SSFC, 5/13/07, p.M6)
1964 Peter Higgs of the Univ. of
Edinburgh postulated the Higgs boson, a particle responsible for mass.
The Higgs mechanism, a way that the massless gauge bosons in a gauge
theory get a mass by interacting with a background Higgs field, was
proposed in 1964 by Robert Brout and Francois Englert, independently by
Peter Higgs and by Gerald Guralnik, C. R. Hagen, and Tom Kibble. It was
inspired by the BCS theory of superconductivity, vacuum structure work
by Yoichiro Nambu, the preceding Ginzburg–Landau theory, and the
suggestion by Philip Anderson that superconductivity could be important
for relativistic physics.
(SFC, 9/18/00,
p.A6)(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Higgs_mechanism)
1968 Aug 19, George Gamow
(b.1904), physicist and writer, died. He popularized the idea of The
Big Bang.
(V.D.-H.K.p.335)(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/George_Gamow)
1968 Oct 27, Lisa Meitner
(b.1878), Austrian-born Swedish physicist, died in England. During the
war while in hiding from Hitler in Sweden, she analyzed and understood
for its significance the work of Otto Hahn who in 1944 was awarded the
Nobel Prize in Physics for his work on nuclear fission.
(MT, 10/94, letters,
p.10)(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lise_Meitner)
1969 Prof. Henry W. Kendall
(1926-1999), American physicist and Nobel Prize winner (1990), helped
establish the Union of Concerned Scientists. The initial focus of the
organization was the opposition of nuclear weapons and nuclear power
plants.
(SFC, 2/17/99,
p.C3)(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Henry_W._Kendall)
1973 Leo Esaki (b.1925), [Esaki
Reona], Japanese-born physicist, won the Nobel Prize.
(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leo_Esaki)
1980 Dr. Clyde Wiegand
(1915-1996), a nuclear physicist at the Lawrence Berkeley National
Laboratory, retired. In the 1970s he opened a field called keonic
physics, wherein subatomic called k-mesons take the place of electrons
in atoms.
(SFC, 7/9/96, p.20)
1984 Oct 20, Paul Dirac (b.1902,
British physicist and Nobel Prize winner (1933), died in Florida. His
equations predicted the existence of antimatter. In 2009 Graham Farmelo
authored “The Strangest Man: The Hidden Life of Paul Dirac.”
(Econ, 1/24/09,
p.89)(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paul_Dirac)
1989 Caltech's Kip Thorne and
colleagues theorized that general relativity permits wormholes, tunnels
that cut across regions of space-time, and showed that with enough
negative energy, they can be propped open.
(WSJ, 11/21/03, p.B1)
1991 Princeton astrophysicist J.
Richard Gott proposed theorized that cosmic strings could warp space
time enough to create paths to the past, called closed timelike curves.
(WSJ, 11/21/03, p.B1)
1991 A dye-sensitized solar cell,
also known as Gratzel cells, was invented by Michael Gratzel and Brian
O'Regan at the École Polytechnique Fédérale de
Lausanne. He pioneered research on energy and electron transfer
reactions in mesoscopic-materials and their optoelectronic applications.
(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dye-sensitized_solar_cell)
1993 In California Richard M.
Diamond (1924-2007), nuclear chemist, and lab partner Frank Stephens
developed and built the original Gammasphere at Berkeley’s 88-inch
cyclotron. It analyzed gamma rays emitted from atoms bombarded in
high-energy nuclear accelerators.
(SFC, 10/20/07, p.B5)
1996 Feb 27, It was reported that
element 112, aka unumbium, was first made in Darmstadt, Germany, in an
experiment led by Peter Armbruster.
(Econ, 5/5/07,
p.100)(http://newton.ex.ac.uk/aip/physnews.260.html)
2000 May 4, Hendrik Casimir
(b.1909), Dutch physicist, died. He was best known for his research on
the two-fluid model of superconductors (together with C. J. Gorter) in
1934 and the Casimir effect (together with D. Polder) in 1946.
(Econ, 5/24/08,
p.105)(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hendrik_Casimir)
2006 Oct 4, Professor Eugene
Polzik and his team at the Niels Bohr Institute at Copenhagen
University in Denmark reported a breakthrough in teleportation by using
both light and matter.
(Reuters, 10/4/06)
2007 Mar 20, Albert Baez (b.1912),
Mexican-American physicist, died. In 1948 he and Paul Kirkpatrick
co-invented the X-ray reflection microscope for the study of living
cells. His books included “The New College Physics: A Spiral Approach”
(1967), and the memoir “A Year in Baghdad” (1988). Baez was also the
father of singers Joan Baez and Mimi Farina.
(SSFC, 3/25/07, p.B3)
2007 Sep 24, Wolfgang K.H.
Panofsky (b.1919), German-born Stanford physicist, died. He led the
construction of the Stanford Linear Accelerator following approval by
Congress in 1961.
(SFC, 9/26/07, p.B7)
2007 Oct 31, Physicists at UC
Berkeley said they had produced the world’s smallest radio out of a
single carbon nanotube, 10,000 times thinner than human hair. They had
it play “Layla” by Derek and the Dominos and said it could also
function as a transmitter.
(SFC, 11/1/07, p.C1)
2007 Walter Isaacson authored
“Einstein: His Life and Universe.”
(WSJ, 4/6/07, p.B3)
2008 Sep 10, In Geneva the Large
Hadron Collider, the world's largest particle collider, passed its
first major tests by firing two beams of protons in opposite directions
around a 17-mile (27-kilometer) underground ring in what scientists
hope is the next great step to understanding the makeup of the
universe. On Sep 19 it started leaking helium and had to be turned off.
The technical problems delayed for at least two months the quest for
scientists to learn more about the nature of the universe and the
origins of all matter.
(AP, 9/10/08)(AP, 9/20/08)(Econ, 9/27/08, p.96)
2008 Oct 7, The Royal Swedish
Academy of Sciences announced that two Japanese citizens and a
Japanese-born American won the 2008 Nobel Prize in physics for
discoveries in the world of subatomic physics.
(AP, 10/7/08)
2008 Richard Muller, a physicist
at UC Berkeley, authored “Physics for Future Presidents: The Science
Behind the Headlines.
(SSFC, 8/3/08, Books p.1)
2008 Leonard Susskind authored
“The Black Hole War: My Battle With Stephen Hawking to Make the World
Safe for Quantum Mechanics.”
(WSJ, 7/28/08, p.A13)
2008 Physicist Frank Wilczek,
Nobel Prize winner (2004), authored “The Lightness of Being: Mass,
Ether, and the Unification of Forces.”
(Econ, 9/6/08, p.98)
2009 Mar 16, Bernard d’Espagnat
(87), French physicist and philosopher, was named in Paris as the
winner of this year’s $1.42 million Templeton Prize.
(SFC, 3/17/09, p.A2)
2009 Jun 11, German researchers
said a new, superheavy chemical element numbered 112, Ununbium, Latin
for 112, will soon be officially included in the periodic table. A team
in Darmstadt first produced 112 in 1996 by firing charged zinc atoms
through a 120-meter-long particle accelerator to hit a lead target.
(Reuters, 6/11/09)
2009 Jul 28, It was reported that
scientists claimed to have created a form of aluminum that's nearly
transparent to extreme ultraviolet radiation and which is a new state
of matter.
(www.livescience.com/technology/090728-new-state-matter.html)
End of file