This Week in Physics History: Dec. 1 - 7
Monday December 1, 2008
- Dec. 6, 1778 - French physicist & chemist Joseph Luis Gay-Lussac is born. Gay-Lussac is best known for the Gay-Lussac Law of gases, which says that pressure and temperature are proportional. He also published Charles' Law, based on previously unpublished work by Jacques Charles.
- Dec. 5, 1901 - Physicist and Nobel laureate Werner Heisenberg is born. Heisenberg was key in the development of quantum physics, with the development of the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle. During World War II, he led German research in nuclear science.
- Dec. 5, 1932 - Albert Einstein is granted an American visa.
- Dec. 2, 1942 - Enrico Fermi's team on the Manhattan Project successfully initiates the first self-sustaining nuclear chain reaction.
- Dec. 7, 1972 - The last Apollo ship, Apollo 17, launches.
- Dec. 7, 1993 - German physicist and Nobel Prize laureate, Wolfgang Paul, dies. Paul was awarded the 1989 Nobel Prize in Physics for his co-discovery of the ion trap. (He should not be confused - as I did last year - with Wolfgang Pauli.)
- Dec. 3, 1999 - The Mars Polar Lander radio signal is lost by NASA as it entered the Martian atmosphere.
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