This Week in Physics History: Dec. 8 - 14
Monday December 8, 2008
- Dec. 14, 1546 - Danish astronomer Tycho Brahe, mentor to Johannes Kepler, is born.
- Dec. 10, 1684 - Edmund Halley reads a paper entitled "De motu corporum in gyrum" ("On the motion of bodies in orbit") to the Royal Society. The paper was written by Sir Isaac Newton, in which he derived Kepler's Laws from his law of gravity.
- Dec. 11, 1761 - Italian amateur physicist Gian Domenico Romagnosi is born. Romagnosi wrote an article in the Gazzetta di Trento in 1802 which hypothesized a relationship between electricity and magnetism, a good 18 years before the 1820 formalization of this relationship by Hans Christian Oersted.
- Dec. 10, 1831 - Baltic German physicist Thomas Johann Seebeck dies. Seebeck is best known for his 1821 discovery of the thermoelectric effect, whereby a temperature differential induces a voltage differential and thereby initiates the flow of electrical current.
- Dec. 11, 1882 - German physicist Max Born is born. Born was one of many instrumental early figures in the development of quantum physics. His work in deriving the interpretation of the probability density function from the Schroedinger equation earned him the 1954 Nobel Prize in Physics.
- Dec. 14, 1900 - Max Planck presents the theoretical derivation of his solution to the ultraviolet catastrophe in blackbody radiation.
- Dec. 10, 1901 - The first Nobel Prizes are awarded.
- Dec. 14, 1922 - Soviet physicist Nikolay Gennadiyevich Basov was born. His work in quantum electronics, which paved the way for the laser and the maser, earned him the 1964 Nobel Prize in Physics.
- Dec. 13, 1923 - American physicist Philip Warren Anderson is born in Indianapolis, Indiana. Anderson received the 1977 Nobel Prize in Physics for his work in investigating electrical properties of magnetic and disordered system. This work was instrumental to the development of more advanced computer systems.
- Dec. 15, 1923 - American physicist Freeman Dyson is born in England. He is well known for his strong social activism (in fields such as nuclear disarmament) and theorizing in futurism and science fiction concepts (such extraterrestrial life and the "Dyson sphere" which has featured in, among other things, an episode of Star Trek: The Next Generation). He is also quite an accomplished physicist who has done work in quantum physics, solid state physics, and nuclear weapon design.
Comments
No comments yet. Leave a Comment