Today in History -  May 20, 1899 – the American Physical Society (APS) is founded for the advancement and diffusion of the knowledge of physics. It was originally formed at Columbia University by 36 scientists from 17 institutions who elected Henry Rowland as their first president and A.A. Michelson as the first vice-president. It has [...]

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Today in History – May 17, 1954 – Official groundbreaking of the CERN laboratory occurred in Geneva. A small number of scientists first envisioned CERN vision as an opportunity to bring nations together through science and build a world-class laboratory for nuclear and particle physics in Europe. CERN’s founding convention emphasized that that it should [...]

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Today in History – April 14, 1932 – First atom is split by a proton beam on a lithium target. Two physicists, Englishman Sir John Douglas Cockcroft and Irishman Ernest Walton developed the first nuclear particle accelerator, the Cockcroft-Walton generator. With this equipment, they succeeded in being the first to split the nucleus of an [...]

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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 [...]

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