This Week in Physics History: Sept. 8 - 14
Monday September 8, 2008
- Sept. 10, 1892 - American physicist Arthur Compton is born. Compton received the 1927 Nobel Prize in physics for his work in discovering the Compton effect, a form of scattering in which electromagnetic radiation (i.e. light waves) and matter interaction. This was a crucial discovery in the early development of quantum physics.
- Sept. 12, 1897 - French scientist Irene Joliot-Curie is born. 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.
- Sept. 14, 1959 - The Soviet probe Luna 2 becomes the first man-made object to reach the moon, as it crashes into the surface of the moon.
- Sept. 10, 1975 - English physicist George Paget Thomson dies. Thomson was the son of J.J. Thomson, the famous physicist & chemist who discovered the electron. George Thomson similarly went on to win a Nobel Prize in Physics in 1937 for his own work in discovering electron diffraction, which was a major step toward understanding the nature of wave particle duality.
- Sept. 10, 1983 - Swiss-born physicist Felix Bloch dies. Bloch received the 1952 Nobel Prize in Physics for his work in discovering the underlying principles of nuclear magnetic resonance which would ultimately lead to the invention of the magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) device.
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