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.^[1]

Chemistry

• Gilbert N. Lewis isolates the first sample of pure heavy water by electrolysis.^[2]

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.^[3]
• David Champernowne, while still a Cambridge undergraduate, publishes his work on the Champernowne constant in real numbers.^[4][5]
• Alfréd Haar introduces Haar measure.^[6]
• Stanley Skewes discovers Skewes' number.^[7]

Medicine

• July 14 – Law for the Prevention of Hereditarily Diseased Offspring enacted in Nazi Germany^[8] 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.^[9]

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.^{[10][11][12][13]}

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.

References

1. Zwicky, F. (1933). "Die Rotverschiebung von extragalaktischen Nebeln". Helvetica Physica Acta 6: 110–127. Bibcode:1933AcHPh...6..110Z.
2. Lewis, G. N. (1933). "The Isotopes of Hydrogen". Journal of the American Chemical Society 55 (3): 1297. doi:10.1021/ja01330a511.
3. Crilly, Tony (2007). 50 Mathematical Ideas you really need to know. London: Quercus. p. 125. ISBN 978-1-84724-008-8.
4. Champernowne, D. G. (1933). "The construction of decimals normal in the scale of ten". Journal of the London Mathematical Society 8: 254–260.
5. "Professor David Champernowne". The Daily Telegraph (London). 4 September 2000. Retrieved 2011-12-02..
6. Haar, Alfred (January 1933). "Der Massbegriff in der Theorie der kontinuierlichen Gruppen". Annals of Mathematics. 2 34 (1): 147–169. doi:10.2307/1968346. JSTOR 1968346. Retrieved 2015-11-19.
7. Skewes, S. (1933). "On the difference π(x) − Li(x)" (PDF). Journal of the London Mathematical Society 8: 277–283. doi:10.1112/jlms/s1-8.4.277. Retrieved 2011-12-02.
8. Coming into force January 1934. Black, Edwin (2001). IBM and the Holocaust. Crown / Random House. p. 93.
9. Wortis, J. (1958). "In Memoriam Manfred Sakel". American Journal of Psychiatry 115: 287–8.
10. Lawrence, Williams L. (27 June 1933). "Human-like eye made by engineers to televise images. 'Iconoscope' converts scenes into electrical energy for radio transmission. Fast as a movie camera. Three million tiny photo cells 'memorize', then pass out pictures. Step to home television. Developed in ten years' work by Dr. V.K. Zworykin, who describes it at Chicago". The New York Times. Retrieved 2010-01-12.
11. Zworykin, V. K. (September 1933). "The Iconoscope, America's latest television favourite". Wireless World (33): 197. Retrieved 2010-01-12.
12. Zworykin, V. K. (October 1933). "Television with cathode ray tubes". Journal of the IEE (Institution of Electrical Engineers) (73): 437–451. Retrieved 2010-01-12.
13. Abramson, Albert (2003). The History of Television, 1942 to 2000. McFarland. p. 18. ISBN 978-0-7864-1220-4. Retrieved 2010-01-10.