1933 in science

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The year 1933 in science and technology involved some significant events, listed below.

Astronomy

• October 13 – The British Interplanetary Society is founded.
• Walter Baade and Fritz Zwicky invent the concept of the neutron star, a new type of celestial object, suggesting that supernovae might be created by the collapse of a normal star to form a neutron star.
• Sir Arthur Eddington publishes The Expanding Universe: Astronomy's 'Great Debate', 1900–1931 in Cambridge.
• Fritz Zwicky postulates the existence of dark matter.

Chemistry

• Gilbert N. Lewis isolates the first sample of pure heavy water by electrolysis.

Earth sciences

• March 10 – Long Beach earthquake in Southern California: First recording of earthquake strong ground motions by an accelerograph network, installed in 1932 by the United States Coast and Geodetic Survey.

Mathematics

• Andrey Kolmogorov publishes Foundations of the Theory of Probability, laying the modern axiomatic foundations of probability theory.
• David Champernowne, while still a Cambridge undergraduate, publishes his work on the Champernowne constant in real numbers.
• Alfréd Haar introduces Haar measure.
• Stanley Skewes discovers Skewes' number.

Medicine

• July 14 – Law for the Prevention of Hereditarily Diseased Offspring enacted in Nazi Germany allowing compulsory sterilization of citizens suffering from a list of alleged genetic disorders.
• Manfred Sakel begins to practice insulin shock therapy on psychiatric patients in Vienna.

Physics

• September 12 – Leó Szilárd, waiting for a red light on Southampton Row in Bloomsbury (London), conceives the idea of the nuclear chain reaction.

Technology

• June – A research group at RCA headed by Vladimir K. Zworykin publicly launches the iconoscope, the first practical cathode ray tube television camera.

Organizations

• Museum of Science and Industry (Chicago) first opens to the public, as part of the Century of Progress Exposition.
• The Institute for Advanced Study opens at Princeton, New Jersey, attracting Albert Einstein, John von Neumann and Kurt Gödel.

Births

• January 6 – Oleg Makarov (died 2003), Soviet cosmonaut.
• March 9 – David Weatherall, English molecular geneticist.
• March 10 – Patricia Bergquist (died 2009), New Zealand scientist specializing in anatomy and taxonomy.
• March 23 – Philip Zimbardo, American social psychologist.
• July 9 – Oliver Sacks (died 2015), English-born neurologist.
• July 12 – Max Birnstiel (died 2014), Swiss molecular biologist.
• August 10 – Ed Posner (died 1993), American mathematician.
• August 15 – Stanley Milgram (died 1984), American social psychologist.
• September 6 – Juliet Clutton-Brock (died 2015), English zooarchaeologist.
• September 10 – Yevgeny Khrunov (died 2000), Soviet cosmonaut.
• September 26 – Charles C. Conley (died 1984), American mathematician specializing in dynamical systems.
• November 1 – Dijen K. Ray-Chaudhuri, Bengali-born mathematician.
• December 23 – Akihito, ichthyologist and Emperor of Japan.

Deaths

• September 25 – Paul Ehrenfest (born 1880), Austrian physicist and mathematician.
• December 8 – John Joly (born 1857), Irish physicist.