This Week in Physics History: Nov. 3 - 9
Monday November 3, 2008
- Nov. 7, 1492 - A meteorite crashes to Earth around noon in a wheat field near Ensisheim, Alsace. The Ensisheim Meteorite is the oldest meteorite with a known date of impact.
- Nov. 8, 1854 - Johannes Rydberg, discovery of the Rydberg State of an atom, is born.
- Nov. 7, 1867 - Maria Sklodowska is born, remembered to posterity as Marie Curie, pioneer in the study of radioactivity. To date, she is the only person to have earned Nobel prizes in two different fields - physics & chemistry.
- Nov. 7, 1878 - Lise Meitner is born. Meitner did ground-breaking work on the discovery of nuclear fission, but was controversially not included in the 1944 Nobel award for the discovery.
- Nov. 5, 1879 - Scottish physicist James Clerk Maxwell dies. Maxwell is best known for unifying electricity and magnetism through Maxwell's Laws into electromagnetic theory.
- Nov. 7, 1888 - Indian physicist Sir Chandrasekhara Venkata Raman is born. Raman received the 1930 Nobel Prize in Physics for work in molecular scattering of light, specifically the discovery of the Raman effect which bears his name.
- Nov. 9, 1921 - Albert Einstein is awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics, primarily for his work in explaining the photoelectric effect.
- Nov. 9, 1934 - Carl Sagan, American astronomer and author, is born. Sagan became best known as a populizer of science through television specials, and both fiction and non-fiction writing. He was the author of the science fiction novel Contact, which was later made into a film starring Jodie Foster.
- Nov. 6, 1944 - The Hanford Atomic Facility first produces plutonium.
- Nov. 5, 1948 - American physicist William Daniel Phillips is born. Phillips won the 1997 Nobel Prize in Physics for his work in laser cooling, which uses lasers to slow the motion of gaseous molecules.
Comments
Curie is the only winner of two Nobels in two different sciences. Pauling won in two fields also (Chemistry and Peace). See http://almaz.com/nobel/double.html for more information.
Thanks again for your terrific blog.