Today in History – September 29, 1954 – CERN convention ratified. 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 foster international collaboration, promote contacts between [...]

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Today in History – September 10, 2008 – Start-Up of CERN’s Large Hadron Collider (LHC),  a gigantic particle accelerator, 27 kilometers in circumference, that spans the border between Switzerland and France. The ‘hadrons’ are two beams of protons that travel in opposite directions inside the circular accelerator, gaining energy until they are moving very close [...]

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Today in History – June 27, 1954 – First nuclear power plant begins operation. In the mid-1950′s, both the Soviet Union and western countries were exploring the non-military uses of the atom. However, even this non-military work was done in secret and not much was known about it in the West at the time. The [...]

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Today in History – June 25, 1903 – Marie Curie defends her doctoral thesis, then gets Nobel Prize five months later. Did she just procrastinate? Or were thesis standards higher a century ago at the Sorbonne? I haven’t seen a good explanation for the delay, other than she was busy discovering new elements. Earlier in [...]

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Today in History – June 8, 1940 – The discovery of element 93, neptunium (symbol Np), a decay product of uranium-239, was announced by Edwin M. McMillan and Philip H. Abelson working at the University of California at Berkeley. Neptunium was named after the planet Neptune and, at the time, was the first element heavier [...]

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