This Week in Physics History: July 2 - 8
Monday July 2, 2007
- July 7, 1668 - Sir Isaac Newton receives his M.A. degree from Trinity College in Cambridge, England.
- July 5, 1687 - Sir Isaac Newton publishes the Philosophiae Naturalis Principia Mathematica. Known to posterity as the Principia, this three-volume work is where Newton laid out his three laws of motion as well as the law of gravity.
- July 6, 1854 - German physicist Georg Ohm dies. Ohm defined the concepts of voltage, current, and resistance, thus starting the ability for electrical circuit analysis and development. He also devised Ohm's law, one of the fundamental equations of circuit analysis which states that the current (I) equals voltage (or potential difference, V) divided by resistance (R) or I = V / R.
- July 2, 1862 - English physicist & chemist William Henry Bragg is born. Bragg has the distinction of sharing the 1915 Nobel Prize in Physics with his son, Henry Lawrence Bragg, for their work in analyzing crystaline structures with x-ray spectroscopy (a practice which would prove crucial in the 1950s to discovering the double helix structure of DNA molecules).
- July 8, 1895 - Russian physicist Igor Tamm is born. He received the 1958 Nobel Prize in physics for his work in the discovery and interpretation of the Cherenkov-Vavilov effect.
- July 2, 1906 - German-American physicist Hans Albrecht Bethe is born. Bethe received the 1967 Nobel Prize in Physics for his work in developing the theory of "stellar nucleosynthesis" - which basically says that the nuclear fusion in stellar formation and decay causes the formation of the heavier elements. Bethe worked ran the Theoretical Division of Los Alamos during the Mahattan Project, though he later was a prominent spokesman against the nuclear arms race, along with Albert Einstein.
- July 8, 1979 - Japanese physicist Sin-Itiro Tomonaga dies. Tomonaga worked on quantum electrodynamics and, along with Richard P. Feynman and Julian Schwinger, received the 1965 Nobel Prize in Physics.
- July 2, 1992 - British physicist Stephen Hawking's book, A Brief History of Time, breaks British publishing records as it remains on the nonfiction bestseller list for three and a half years, selling over 3 million copies in 22 languages. A Brief History of Time is a classic physics book which explains in language that laymen can easily understand the origins and development of the universe.
- July 4, 1997 - The U.S. Pathfinder lands on Mars. The Pathfinder mission releases the Sojourner rover to explore Mars' surface, running for 84 days - much longer than its design estimate of 7 days.
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