1946 in science
From Infogalactic: the planetary knowledge core
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The year 1946 in science and technology involved some significant events, listed below.
Contents
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]
Cartography
- The Chamberlin trimetric projection is developed in 1946 by Wellman Chamberlin for the National Geographic Society.[5]
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.[6] It is programmable by plugboard and uses conditional branching.
- December 11 – Frederick Williams receives a patent for a random-access memory device.[7]
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.[8]
- Harold Gillies begins to perform sex reassignment surgery on Michael Dillon, including the first female-to-male transsexual phalloplasty.[9]
- 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.[10][11]
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[12] and in English.[13] The related kinetic transport theory is considered by John Gamble Kirkwood in a paper[14] 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.[15]
Awards
Births
- May 11 – Robert Jarvik, American co-inventor of the Jarvik-7 artificial heart
- June 13 – Paul L. Modrich, American biochemist, recipient of the Nobel Prize in Chemistry
- June 24 – Ellison Onizuka (killed 1986), American astronaut
- July 2 – Richard Axel, American physiologist, recipient of the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine
- August 2 – Nigel Hitchin, English mathematician
- August 11 – Marilyn vos Savant, American polymath
- September 7 – Francisco Varela (died 2001), Chilean-born biologist and philosopher
- September 8 – Aziz Sancar, Turkish biochemist, recipient of the Nobel Prize in Chemistry
- September 28 – Morinobu Endo, Japanese chemist
- October 14 – Kay Redfield Jamison, American clinical psychologist
- October 17 – Carol Dweck, American social 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
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- ↑ Österreichische Zoologische Zeitschrift 1: pp. 1–48.
- ↑ Lua error in package.lua at line 80: module 'strict' not found. (photographs by Kenneth Middleham)
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- ↑ "1946." Britannica.
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- ↑ "Nobel Laureates 1946." Nobelprize.