Learn about the history of science by reading about the significant scientific events that took place on this day in history.
1943 - Jocelyn Bell Burnell was born.
Burnell is a Irish astrophysicist who, as a graduate student, discovered the first four pulsars. Pulsars are neutron stars that are highly magnetized and emit beams of electromagnetic radiation in short pulses. The pulsars were originally dubbed LGM or Little Green Men after the possibility the radio sources were a signal from an extraterrestrial civilization. Her doctoral advisor, Antony Hewish was awarded half the 1974 Nobel Prize in Physics for the discovery.1928 - Carl Richard Woese was born.
Woese is an American microbiologist who identified Archaea as a third kingdom of life based on the genetic differences between Bacteria and Eucaryota. Archarea are single cell organisms with no nucleus or other organelles. They can live in harsh environments where other forms of life could not exist.1922 - Leon Max Lederman was born.
Lederman is an American physicist who shares the 1988 Nobel Prize in Physics with Jack Steinberger and Melvin Schwartz for the discovery of the muon neutrino and the doublet structure of leptons. He also discovered the existence of the bottom quark flavor.1921 - Robert Bruce Merrifield was born.
Merrifield was an American biochemist who invented the process of solid phase peptide synthesis. Peptides would be built one amino acid at a time on a substrate of polymer to form custom chains and then the substrate would be chemically removed. This technique would earn him the 1984 Nobel Prize in Chemistry.1919 - Hermann Emil Fischer died.
Nobel Prize Foundation
Fischer was a German chemist who was awarded the 1902 Nobel Prize in Chemistry for his research into sugar and purine synthesis. Purine is the name for a family of organic compounds that are composed of a two ring structure of nitrogen and carbon atoms. Fisher coined the term purine and synthesized several purines such as adenine, xanthine and caffeine.
Fischer synthesized the sugars glucose, fructose and mannose for the first time. He also discovered the cyclic amino acids proline and oxyproline and identified the peptide bond that holds together amino acid chains.
1918 - Bertram Neville Brockhouse was born.
Brockhouse was a Canadian physicist who was awarded half the 1994 Nobel Prize in Physics for the development of neutron spectroscopy. His method involves firing a beam of neutrons at a target and measuring the energy of the scattered neutrons to determine the target's lattice vibrational energies.1915 - Albert Ghiorso was born.
Ghiorso was an American nuclear chemist who co-discovered 12 transuranic elements while working at the University of California, Berkeley laboratory. He is credited with the partial discovery of americium, curium, berkelium, californium, einsteinium, fermium, mendelevium, nobelium, lawrencium, rutherfordium, dubnium and seaborgium.1904 - Pavel Alekseyevich Cherenkov was born.
Idaho National Labs/DOE
Cherenkov was a Soviet physicist who shares the 1958 Nobel Prize in Physics with Igor Yevgenyevich Tamm and Il´ja Mikhailovich Frank for their discovery and description of the Cherenkov effect. The Cherenkov effect occurs when a particle passes through a medium at a speed greater than the speed of light in that medium. This causes a distinctive blue glow that is commonly seen in water around nuclear reactors.
