1946 in science
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The year 1946 in science and technology involved some significant events, listed below.
Astronomy
- January 10 – The United States Army Signal Corps' Project Diana bounces radar waves off the Moon.
- Reginald Aldworth Daly of Harvard University first proposes a giant impact hypothesis to account for formation of the moon.[1]
Biology
- November 10 – Peter Scott opens the Slimbridge Wetland Reserve in England.
- Karl von Frisch publishes "Die Tänze der Bienen" ("The dances of the bees").[2]
- Edmund Jaeger discovers and later documents, in The Condor,[3] a state of extended torpor, approaching hibernation, in a bird, the Common Poorwill.[4]
Computer science
- February 14–15 – ENIAC, the first non-classified all-electronic Turing complete computer, built under the direction of J. Presper Eckert and John Mauchly, is announced and dedicated at the University of Pennsylvania's Moore School of Electrical Engineering.[5] It is programmable by plugboard and uses conditional branching.
- December 11 – Frederick Williams receives a patent for a random-access memory device.[6]
Medicine
- July 14 – Dr. Benjamin Spock's The Common Sense Book of Baby and Child Care is first published in New York; it becomes one of the biggest best-sellers of all time.[7]
- Harold Gillies begins to perform sex reassignment surgery on Michael Dillon, including the first female-to-male transsexual phalloplasty.[8]
- Chance Brothers of Smethwick, England, produce the first all-glass syringe with interchangeable barrel and plunger, allowing easy mass-sterilisation of components.
- Alfred Gilman, with Frederick S. Philips, first publish the results of trials of anti-cancer chemotherapy, using mechlorethamine, carried out with Louis S. Goodman.[9][10]
Physics
- January 1 – Atomic Energy Research Establishment established at Harwell, Oxfordshire under John Cockcroft.
- The BBGKY hierarchy of equations for s-particle distribution functions is applied to the derivation of kinetic equations by Nikolay Bogolyubov in a paper received in July 1945 and published in 1946 in Russian[11] and in English.[12] The related kinetic transport theory is considered by John Gamble Kirkwood in a paper[13] received in October 1945 and published in March 1946. The first paper by Max Born and Herbert S. Green considering a general kinetic theory of liquids is received in February 1946 and published on 31 December 1946.[14]
Awards
Births
- May 11 – Robert Jarvik, American co-inventor of the Jarvik-7 artificial heart
- June 24 – Ellison Onizuka (killed 1986), American astronaut
- July 2 – Richard Axel, American physiologist, Nobel prize winner
- August 11 – Marilyn vos Savant, American polymath
- September 7 – Francisco Varela (died 2001), Chilean-born biologist and philosopher
- September 28 – Morinobu Endo, Japanese chemist
- October 14 – Kay Redfield Jamison, American clinical psychologist
- December 31 – Roy Porter (died 2002), English medical historian
- Faiza Al-Kharafi, Kuwaiti electrochemist
Deaths
- March 8 – Frederick W. Lanchester (born 1868), automotive engineer.
- March 23 – Gilbert N. Lewis (born 1875), chemist; first to isolate deuterium.
- March 26 – Gerhard Heilman (born 1859), paleo-ornithologist.
- May 2 – Simon Flexner (born 1863), pathologist and bacteriologist.
- June 14 – John Logie Baird (born 1888), inventor.
- August 13 – H. G. Wells (born 1866), scientific populariser.
- September 16 – James Hopwood Jeans (born 1877), mathematician and scientist.
- October 2 – Ignacy Mościcki (born 1867), chemist and President of Poland.
- October 4 – Barney Oldfield (born 1878), automobile racer.
- Israel Aharoni (born 1882), zoologist.
References
- ↑ Daly, Reginald A. (1946). "Origin of the Moon and Its Topography". Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society 90 (2): 104–19. JSTOR 3301051. Retrieved 2014-06-06.
- ↑ Österreichische Zoologische Zeitschrift 1: pp. 1–48.
- ↑ Jaeger, Edmund C. (May–June 1949). "Further Observations on the Hibernation of the Poor-will". The Condor. 3 51 (3): 105–109. ISSN 0010-5422. JSTOR 1365104. OCLC 478309773.
Earlier I gave an account (Condor, 50, 1948:45) of the behavior of a Poor-will (Phalaenoptilus nuttallinii) which I found in a state of profound torpidity in the winter of 1946–47 in the Chuckawalla Mountains of the Colorado Desert, California.
(photographs by Kenneth Middleham) - ↑ Hiltner, Nita (February 20, 2011). "A Look Back". The Press-Enterprise (Riverside, California: Enterprise Media). Retrieved November 15, 2011.
- ↑ "1946." Britannica.
- ↑ "Computing timeline". The Centre for Computing History. Retrieved 2012-01-29.
- ↑ Meisol, Patricia (17 March 1998). "Echoes from the baby boom appreciation: for 50 years, parents turned to the book by Dr. Benjamin Spock for the most common-sense advice about raising children". The Baltimore Sun. Retrieved 2010-03-31.
- ↑ Roach, Mary (2007-03-18). "Girls Will Be Boys". The New York Times. Archived from the original on 22 March 2007. Retrieved 2007-03-25.
- ↑ Gilman, Alfred; Philips, Frederick S. (5 April 1946). "The Biological Actions and Therapeutic Applications of the Β-Chloroethyl Amines and Sulfides". Science 103 (2675): 409–15, 436. Bibcode:1946Sci...103..409G. doi:10.1126/science.103.2675.409. JSTOR 1673195. PMID 17751251.
- ↑ Gilman, Alfred (1963). "The Initial Clinical Trial of Nitrogen Mustard". American Journal of Surgery 105 (5): 574–578. doi:10.1016/0002-9610(63)90232-0. PMID 13947966. Retrieved 2012-05-31.
- ↑ Bogoliubov, N. N. (1946). "Kinetic Equations". Journal of Experimental and Theoretical Physics 16 (8): 691–702.
- ↑ Bogoliubov, N. N. (1946). "Kinetic Equations". Journal of Physics USSR 10 (3): 265–274.
- ↑ Kirkwood, John G. (March 1946). "The Statistical Mechanical Theory of Transport Processes I. General Theory". Journal of Chemical Physics 14 (3): 180. Bibcode:1946JChPh..14..180K. doi:10.1063/1.1724117.
- ↑ Born, M.; Green, H. S. (31 December 1946). "A General Kinetic Theory of Liquids I. The Molecular Distribution Functions". Proceedings of the Royal Society A 188: 10–18. Bibcode:1946RSPSA.188...10B. doi:10.1098/rspa.1946.0093.
- ↑ "Nobel Laureates 1946." Nobelprize.