This Week in Physics History: June 23 - 29
Monday June 23, 2008
- June 26, 1824 - British mathematician, engineer, and physicist William Thomas, 1st Baron Kelvin ("Lord Kelvin"), was born. He did much work in electricity and thermodynamics, devising a scale of temperature measurement based on an absolute scale, so that absolute zero is zero on the scale. The SI unit for this temperature scale is the kelvin.
- June 24, 1883 - Austrian-American physicist Victor Francis Hess is born. He received the 1936 Nobel Prize in Physics for his discovery of cosmic rays, along with Carl David Anderson. Hess fled Austria in 1938 to escape persecution by the Nazis.
- June 28, 1906 - German-born physicist Maria Goeppert-Mayer is born. Goeppert-Mayer's work in proposing the nuclear shell model of the atomic nucleus earned her the 1963 Nobel Prize in Physics, being only the second woman other than Marie Curie to receive a Nobel Prize in Physics.
- June 27, 1931 - Dutch physicist Martinus J. G. Veltman is born. Veltman's work in "elucidating the quantum structure of electroweak interactions in physics" (from Nobel Prize announcement) won him the 1999 Nobel Prize in Physics. He has an asteroid, Asteroid 9492 Veltman, named after him, as well. He is author of the 2003 book, intended for a broad audience, Facts and Mysteries in Elementary Particle Physics.
- June 26, 1937 - American physicist Robert Coleman Richardson is born. Richardson won the 1996 Nobel Prize in Physics for his work in the discovery of superfluidity in helium-3. Richardson is also one of four Eagle Scouts to have become Nobel Prize laureates - two of whom (including Richardson) were for physics.
- June 28, 1943 - German physicist Klaus von Klitzing is born. Klitzing received the 1985 Nobel Prize in Physics for his discovery of the Integer Quantum Hall Effect.
- June 27, 1954 - The world's first nuclear power station goes online in Obninsk, Russia, near Moscow.
- June 24, 1983 - American astronaut Sally Ride (first American woman in space) returns to Earth.
- June 25, 1995 - Irish physicist Ernest Walton dies. Walton recieved the 1951 Nobel Prize in Physics for his work in "splitting the atom," which is using accelerated particles to transmute an atomic nucleus from one element to another.
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