This Week in Physics History: Jan. 28 - Feb. 3
Monday January 28, 2008
- Jan. 29, 1929 - Abdus Salam, Pakistani theoretical physicist & Nobel Prize laureate, is born. Salam's 1979 Nobel Prize in Physics was largely for his work in consolidating the electromagnetic and weak nuclear forces into the the theory of the electroweak force, a key step in forming a unified field theory.
- Jan. 31, 1929 - Rudolf Mossbauer, German physicist & Nobel Prize laureate, is born. His 1961 Nobel Prize was for the discovery of the Mossbauer effect, having to do with the emission of gamma rays from nuclear transition without recoil.
- Feb. 2, 1935 - In a mingling of electronics and biology, Leonard Keeler performs his first test of the polygraph machine in Portage, Wisconsin.
- Jan. 31, 1950 - United States President Harry S. Truman announces a program to develop the hydrogen bomb. The first successful hydrogen bomb was tested in the United States in 1952.
- Feb. 1, 1958 - American physicist Clinton Joseph Davisson dies. Davisson received the 1937 Nobel Prize in Physics for his discovery of electron diffraction, one of the key discoveries supporting wave particle duality. (He shared the Nobel Prize with George Paget Thomson, who independently discovered electron diffraction around the same time.)
- Feb. 1, 1976 - German physicist & Nobel Prize laureate Werner Heisenberg dies. Heisenberg provided a lot of theoretical foundations of quantum mechanics, including the famous Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle. During World War II, Heisenberg led his nation's research into development of nuclear energy & weaponry.
- Feb. 3, 1985 - American physicist Frank Friedman Oppenheimer dies. He was the younger brother J. Robert Oppenheimer, and also worked on the Manhattan Project. Frank Oppenheimer's career in physics was essentially ruined when he admitted before the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC) in 1949 that he had been a member of the Communist Party and refused to name other members he knew.
- Jan. 30, 1991 - John Bardeen, American physicist, electrical engineer, & Nobel Prize laureate, dies. He is the only individual to have won two Nobel Prizes in physics: in 1956 for development of the transistor and in 1972 for the theory of superconductivity.
- Feb. 1, 2003 - The U.S. space shuttle Columbia disaster occurs when the shuttle falls apart upon reentry to the Earth's atmosphere. Seven astronauts are killed in the disaster.
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