1946 in science

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]

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]

Earth sciences

• Arthur Holmes estimates the age of the Earth, using uranium–lead dating of minerals, at 4,500±100 Ma.

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.
• May 21 – Manhattan Project physicist Louis Slotin accidentally triggers a fission reaction at the Los Alamos National Laboratory and gives himself a lethal dose of hard radiation, making him the second victim of a criticality accident in history.
• 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

• Nobel Prizes^[16]
  • Physics – Percy Williams Bridgman
  • Chemistry – James B. Sumner, John Howard Northrop, Wendell Meredith Stanley
  • Medicine – Hermann Joseph Muller

Births

• February 26 – Ahmed Zewail (died 2016), Egyptian-born "father of femtochemistry", recipient of the Nobel Prize in Chemistry
• 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