This Week in Phyics History: Mar. 17 - 23
Monday March 17, 2008
- Mar. 22, 1772 - English natural philosopher (scientist) John Canton dies. Canton was a prominent member of the Royal Society. A close correspondent with Benjamin Franklin, Canton was the first English scientist to verify his theories about the relationship of lightning and electricity.
- Mar. 17, 1853 - Austrian mathematician & physicist Johann Christian Andreas Doppler dies. Doppler is best known for discovering the Doppler effect related to wave signals between a moving source and/or a moving receiver.
- Mar. 22, 1868 - American physicist Robert Millikan is born. He was an excellent experimentalist and won the 1923 Nobel Prize in Physics for calculating the electrical charge of an electron, as well as for experimental verification of the photoelectric effect explanation described in Einstein's 1905 paper.
- Mar. 23, 1912 - German-born physicist Wernher von Braun is born. Von Braun is a controversial figure, having led Nazi Germany's V-2 rocketry develop program before and during World War II. At the end of the war he entered the U.S. through Operation Paperclip, an American intelligent program of extracting Nazi scientists from Germany to work for the United States. Von Braun organized his engineers to surrender to the Americans, and had to evade German SS soldiers to do so. He performed significant work on American ICBM development and later became director of NASA's Marshall Space Flight Center, earning credit as the father of the United States space program.
- Mar. 19, 1915 - Pluto is photographed for the first time. At the time it was not identified as a planet, which turned out to be true since in 2006 it was determined that Pluto was, in fact, not a planet.
- Mar. 20, 1916 - Albert Einstein publishes his complete theory of relativity, combining the concepts of both special relativity and general relativity.
- Mar. 22, 1931 - American particle physicist Burton Richter was born. Richter discovered the psi particle and was awarded 1976 Nobel Prize in Physics (along with Samuel Ting, who had discovered the psi particle independently).
- Mar. 17, 1956 - French scientist Irene Joliot-Curie dies. She was the daughter of famed scientists Pierre & Marie Curie. Jointly with her husband, Frederic Joliot-Curie, she was awarded the 1935 Nobel Prize for Chemistry in recognition of their work in discovering artificial radioactivity.
- Mar. 20, 1964 - The European Space Research Organization (ESRO), the precursor of the current European Space Agency, is established.
- Mar. 19, 1987 - French physicist Louis-Victor-Pierre-Raymond, 7th duc de Broglie dies. Louis de Broglie won the 1929 Nobel Prize in Physics for the de Broglie hypothesis, outlined in his doctoral thesis, which defines the relationship of how the wave properties of particles in wave particle duality, a fundamental principle of quantum physics.
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