This Week in Physics History: Feb. 19 - 25
Monday February 19, 2007
- Feb. 19, 1473 - Nicolas Copernicus is born. Copernicus developed the first heliocentric model of the universe in modern times, and his work is considered the beginning of modern astronomy.
- Feb. 20, 1844 - Ludwig Boltzmann is born. He is best known for his work in describing the dynamics of an ideal gas, in a formula known as the Boltzmann equation.
- Feb. 23, 1855 - Carl Friedrich Gauss dies. Gauss was a brilliant mathematician and physicist, who did unpublished work in non-Euclidean geometries, and provided a foundation for future work in magnetism. The cgs unit for magnetic induction, the gauss, was named in his honor.
- Feb. 22, 1857 - Heinrich Rudolph Hertz is born in Hamburg, Germany. Hertz was the first to demonstrate the existence of electromagnetic radiation by producing a device that produced UHF radio waves. He SI unit of frequency, the hertz, is named after him.
- Feb. 23, 1893 - Rudolph Diesel receives a patent for the diesel engine.
- Feb. 19, 1916 - Ernst Mach dies. Mach is best known as the namesake of the Mach speed rating. He did extensive work in optics and acoustics, focusing primarily on the Doppler effect.
- Feb. 19, 1941 - David Gross is born in Washington, D.C. He goes on to become a particle physicist who does work in string theory. He was awarded the 2004 Nobel Prize in Physics for his 1973 discovery of asymptotic freedom (along with his colleagues Frank Wilczek & David Politzer).
- Feb. 23, 1943 - Dr. Glenn T. Seaborg first produces and isolates plutonium.
- Feb. 21, 1953 - Francis Harry Compton Crick & James D. Watson use X-ray crystallography to analyze the structure of the DNA molecule and discover that it has a double helix structure, for which the two were awarded the 1962 Nobel Prize for Physiology or Medicine, along with Maurice Wilkins.
- Feb. 23, 1956 - The Earth is bombarded with a burst of photons & other nuclei from a solar flare known as the great flare.
- Feb. 20, 1962 - John Glenn becomes the first American to orbit the Earth.
- Feb. 20, 1972 - Maria Goeppert-Mayer dies. She recieved the 1963 Nobel Prize in Physics for proposing the nuclear shell model of the atomic nucleus, becoming the second of two women to have won the Nobel Prize in Physics (the first being Marie Curie).
- Feb. 19, 1986 - The Mir space station is launched by the Soviet Union.
- Feb. 19, 2002 - Using a sophisticated thermal imaging system, NASA's Mars Odyssey space probe begins mapping the surface of Mars.
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