Today in History – March 8, 1775 – Priestley discovers oxygen through experiments with mice. Oxygen was independently discovered in the 1770’s; the most famous names associated with this discovery are Joseph Priestley, Carl Wilhelm Scheele and Antoine Lavoisier. Credit is usually given to Joseph Priestley as he had the first publication [...]

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Today in History – February 29, 1940 – The Nobel Prize in Physics was presented to Ernest Lawrence “for the invention and development of the cyclotron and for results obtained with it, especially with regard to artificial radioactive elements”. Due to WWII, the prize could not be awarded in Sweden and was awarded instead in [...]

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James Chadwick and the Alsos Digital Library for Nuclear Issues

Today in History – February 27, 1932 – Chadwick publishes his discovery of the neutron. Until 1932, the atom was known to consist of a positively charged nucleus surrounded by enough negatively charged electrons to make the atom electrically neutral. Most of the atom was empty [...]

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Today in History – February 11, 1939 – a “one page note” appeared in the magazine Nature by Lise Meitner and her nephew Otto Robert Frisch, entitled “Disintegration of Uranium by Neutrons: A New Type of Nuclear Reaction,” where for the first time a theoretical explanation for the splitting of uranium atoms was published and [...]

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Today in History – January 26, 1697-  Isaac Newton solves Bernoulli’s brachistochrone problem, inventing the “calculus of variations”. The story goes that Jean Bernoulli gave Isaac Newton a challenge solve the following problem in six months:
We are given two fixed points in a vertical plane. A particle starts from rest at one [...]

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