This Week in Physics History: July 9 - 15
Monday July 9, 2007
- July 11, 1811 - Italian physicist and chemist Amedeo Avogadro publishes his memoirs, in which he defines his theories about the molecular nature of gases. It would be nearly a century before this was adopted by mainstream scientists.
- July 14, 1827 - French physicist Augustin-Jean Fresnel dies. Fresnel performed extensive theoretical and experimental into the behavior of light, specifically in the field of wave optics. His work was more appreciated after his death than in his own lifetime, as he demonstrated many useful interpretations of Thomas Young's double slit experiment and other wave phenomena in light.
- July 9, 1894 - Russian physicist Pyotr Leonidovich Kapitsa is born. Kapitsa discovered superfluidity in 1937, for which he received the 1978 Nobel Prize in Physics.
- July 9, 1911 - American theoretical physicist John Archibald Wheeler is born. Wheeler worked with Einstein on his attempts to define a workable unified field theory, which ultimately proved unsuccessful. He also coined the term black hole.
- July 12, 1913 - Willis Eugene Lamb, Jr., is born. Lamb's work discovered certain electromagnetic properties of the electron. His work in spectroscopy to discover the fine structure of the hydrogen spectrum earned him the 1955 Nobel Prize in Physics.
- July 11, 1916 - Russian physicist Aleksandr Mikhailovich Prokhorov is born. His work on lasers and masers earned him the 1964 Nobel Prize in Physics.
- July 10, 1917 - American television personality Don Herbert - known as "Mr. Wizard" - is born. Mr. Wizard exposed children to science in intriguing ways from 1951 through 1991, with various lapses of the show in between (although it continued in re-runs).
- July 10, 1920 - American physicist Owen Chamberlain is born. Chamberlain's experimental work included the 1955 discovery of the antiproton, which earned him the 1959 Nobel Prize in Physics.
- July 9, 1926 - American-Danish physicist Ben Roy Mottelson is born. He received the 1975 Nobel Prize in Physics for his theoretical work with the structure of atomic nuclei.
- July 9, 1955 - The Russell-Einstein Manifesto was released by philosopher Bertrand Russell and Albert Einstein, urging peaceful resolutions to international conflicts (especially in regards to the Cold War) and expounding on the dangers posed by the nuclear weapons.
- July 15, 1955 - Eighteen Nobel Laureates sign Mainau Declaration against the proliferation of nuclear weapons, perhaps in an effort not to not let themselves be shown up by Einstein & Russell. Signers included Werner Heisenberg, Max Born, Wolfgang Paul (not to be confused with Wolfgang Pauli), and Linus Pauling.
- July 10, 1962 - The world's first communication satellite, Telstar, is launched into orbit.
- July 11, 1962 - The first transatlantic satellite television transmission is sent.
- July 11, 1979 - The space station Skylab crashes to the Earth.
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