This Week in Physics History: April 28 - May 4
Monday April 28, 2008
- Apr. 30, 1006 - The brightest supernova in recorded history, Supernova SN 1006, first appears in the constellation Lupus.
- May 3, 1892 - English physicist George Paget Thomson is born. The son of Nobel Prize winning physicist J.J. Thomson (discoverer of the electron particle), George Paget Thomson proved that electrons could undergo diffraction, a major contribution to the theory of wave particle duality, for which he won a Nobel Prize in 1937.
- May 3, 1902 - French physicist Alfred Kastler is born. Kastler won the 1966 Nobel Prize in Physics "for the discovery and development of optical methods for studying Hertzian resonances in atoms," work which helped lead to the development of the laser and maser.
- May 3, 1921 - American physicist Arthur Leonard Schawlow is born. Schawlow won the 1981 Nobel Prize in Physics for his work on laser spectroscopy.
- May 1, 1930 - The (then) planet Pluto was officially named. In 2006 it was reclassified as a dwarf planet.
- May 3, 1933 - American physicist Steven Weinberg is born. Weinberg was awarded the 1979 Nobel Prize in Physics for his work in combining electromagnetism, the weak nuclear force, and the strong nuclear force, three of the fundamental forces of physics, into a single framework called the Standard Model of quantum physics.
- Apr. 30, 1993 - The World Wide Web is invented at the European particle accelerator CERN.
- Apr. 28, 2001 - Space becomes a tourist trap as millionaire Dennis Tito becomes the first "space tourist" by buying passage on a Russian space launch, though he did perform several experiments and prefers the term "independent researcher."
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