Excerpt from "2018’s Top 10 Science Anniversaries," posted on Science News, January 5, 2018.
With each new year, science offers a fresh list of historical occasions ideally suited for a Top 10 list.
Science’s rich history guarantees a never-ending supply of noteworthy anniversaries. Centennials of births, deaths or discoveries by prominent scientists (or popular centennial fractions or multiples) offer reminders of past achievements and context for appreciating science of the present day. To keep the holiday spirit pleasant, we’ll omit the plagues and natural disasters (so no mention of the centennial of the Spanish flu pandemic or the tricentennial of the Gansu earthquake in the Qing Empire). But that leaves plenty of math, medicine, astronomy and quantum stuff. Such as:
10. Quantum teleportation (25th anniversary)
At a physics meeting in Seattle in March 1993, Charles Bennett of IBM thrilled science fiction fans everywhere by revealing the theory of quantum teleportation. (A few days later, a paper by Bennett and his teleportation collaborators appeared in Physical Review Letters.) Bennett described how quantum experimentalists Alice and Bob could use quantum entanglement to erase the identity of a quantum particle at one location and restore it at a remote location — just like Captain Kirk disappearing in the Enterprise transporter and reappearing on some dangerous alien planet. It’s not magic, though. Alice and Bob must each possess one of a pair of entangled quantum particles. If Alice wants to teleport a quantum particle to Bob, she must let it interact with her entangled particle and send the result to Bob by e-mail (or text, or phone call, or snail mail). That interaction destroys Alice’s copy of the particle to be teleported, but Bob can reconstruct it using his entangled particle after Alice e-mails him. In 1993, it was just an idea, but a few years later it was successfully demonstrated in the lab.
9. Arnold Sommerfeld (150th birthday)
Born in Königsberg, Prussia, (now part of Russia) on December 5, 1868, Arnold Sommerfeld played a major role in advancing early quantum theory in the years after Niels Bohr introduced the quantum version of the hydrogen atom. Sommerfeld showed how to extend quantum ideas from circular to elliptical electron orbits, making him kind of like a Kepler to Bohr’s Copernicus. Earlier Sommerfeld had been one of the first strong supporters of Einstein’s special theory of relativity. Sommerfeld also mentored an all-star cast of 20th century physicists, his students including Wolfgang Pauli, Werner Heisenberg and Hans Bethe.
8. Jean Fourier (250th birthday)
Jean Baptiste Joseph Fourier, born March 21, 1768, survived multiple arrests during the French Revolution and ended up working for Napoleon, who made him a baron. With Napoleon’s demise, Fourier struggled to regain political favor and acceptance in the academic world, and eventually succeeded, but his political and diplomatic embroilments consumed much of his time when he should have been doing math. Nevertheless he did important work on the mathematics of heat diffusion and developed useful techniques for solving equations. His most famous achievement, Fourier’s theorem, allows complex periodic processes to be broken down into a series of simpler wave motions. It has wide application in many realms of physics and engineering.
7. James Joule (200th birthday)
James Joule was born into a family of brewers on December 24, 1818. The brewery provided a laboratory where he developed exceptional experimental skills. Despite no formal scientific training and no academic job, he still became one of England’s leading scientists. His experimental skill led him to precisely establish the amount of work needed to produce a quantity of heat and the relationship between heat and electricity.
Most famously, he demonstrated the law of conservation of energy. Whether mechanical, electrical or chemical, energy’s quantitative relationship to heat remained the same, regardless of the substances used in conducting the measurements, Joule showed. In other words, energy is conserved — a truth now known as the First Law of Thermodynamics. There were no Nobel Prizes in those days, so Joule’s main reward was the designation of the standard unit of energy as the joule.
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