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Scientific Anniversaries in 2020
John Graunt’s 400th Birthday Graunt was recognized as the pioneer of drawing scientific conclusions from the analysis of statistical information; his work is considered a cornerstone in the foundation of the modern sciences of statistics and demography. Graunt’s work earned him election to the Royal Society, but the Great Fire of London in 1666 burned down his house, damaging his business and sending him straight into poverty.
Florence Nightingale’s 200th Birthday I’m sure you all know the lady with the lamp, the most famous nurse of the 19th century. But did you also know she was a health and hygiene pioneer and expert in health statistics? While working in the Crimea, the horrifyingly unsanitary conditions led her to institute a cleanliness regimen that greatly reduced the death rate. She then became an expert in health statistics, and her methods influenced the development of epidemiology. Her presentation of statistical evidence for the benefits of health standards in graphical form, made her a pioneer of data visualiation and influenced policy makers to adopt her methods.
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Electromagnetism In 1800 Volta invented the primitive battery. This started research into links between electricity and magnetism. Among the researchers was H. C. Oersted who long suspected that electricity and magnetism shared a deep unity. After noticing a current causing a nearby compass needle to move, he conducted experiments enabling the generation of a magnetic field outside a wire carrying an electric current. About a decade later Michael Faraday showed the opposite, that moving a magnet around a wire induces an electric current.
Roger Bacon’s 800th Birthday
Bacon was one of the top natural philosophers of his day; he studied at Oxford and lectured at the University of Paris. Later Bacon became a Franciscan monk, but often got in trouble for breaking the order’s rules. Bacon was among the first advocates in this era for the importance of experiment in investigating nature. He also understood the importance of using math when explaining natural phenomena.
Discovery of X-rays
When Wilhelm Röntgen discovered X-rays in 1895, they were almost immediately put to use in medical practice. Later experiments on X-rays showed that electromagnetic “waves” sometimes behave as particles and eventually gave the images that led to determing the structure of DNA.
By Freya Cleasby
The Great Debate
On April 26, 1920, astronomers Harlow Shapley and Heber Curtis faced off at the Smithsonian. The two argued whether the Milky Way galaxy, constituted the whole universe or if the Milky Way was in fact one of many galaxies. The debate winner was only announced in 1924, when Edwin Hubble showed that spiral-shaped nebulae visible through telescopes were in fact distant island galaxies, proving Curtis right.
Invention of the Atomic Bomb
When an atom of radioactive material splits into lighter atoms, there is a sudden, powerful, release of energy. This is called nuclear fission. Atomic bombs are weapons that get their energy from fission reactions. In 1942 scientists and military officials were brought together to work on the Manhattan Project, pioneering nuclear research. Much of the work was under the direction of the famous theoretical physicist J. Robert Oppenheimer. On July 16, 1945, in a remote desert in New Mexico, the first atomic bomb was successfully detonated.
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Rosalind Franklin’s 100th Birthday
It was at King’s College London that Franklin, under the supervision of Maurice Wilkins, took up DNA studies and produced exceptional X-ray images. She came two papers by de Broglie and Bose and ended up envisioning wavy “boson” atoms that would merge into a kind of cloud of unified
close to determining DNA’s double-helix structure, but didn’t get it quite right. James Watson was shown one of her X-ray images by Wilkins in early 1953, enabling Watson and Francis Crick to deduce the correct DNA architecture. She sadly died before the Nobel Prize was awarded to Watson and Crick. Wilkins also shared the prize, but there is no doubt that had she still been alive, Franklin would have deserved it more than he did.
Discovery of the neutron
After the discovery of the atomic nucleus, in 1911, scientists spent years trying to understand how the nucleus was put together. Rutherford deduced that there was a nuclear particle carrying positive charge. He named it the proton. However, the number of protons needed for the atom’ mass did not balance with the amount of orbiting electrons. Years later Rutherford surmised that there was another neutral particle in the nucleus that he called the neutron. In 1932, experiments by the British physicist James Chadwick confirmed the existence of the neutron, surpris-
The Bose-Einstein Condensate
Seven decades after it’s prediction, physicists produced a new weird wavy form of matter called a Bose-Einstein condensate. In 1924, Einstein mashed up concepts from ing many physicists who had not believed Rutherford.
matter. Making a Bose-Einstein condensate cloud requires special supercooled conditions, and finally in 1995 physicists were able to overcome technical limitations and prove Einstein right!
