This Week in Physics History: April 21 – 27

This Week in Physics History: April 21 – 27 April 27, 2008 • Apr. 23, 1858- German physicist & Nobel laureate Max Planck is born. Planck is credited as the father of quantum physics, because his solution to the ultraviolet catastrophe in blackbody radiation involved assuming that energy traveled in discrete packets, which he termed quanta. He derived a value, later called Planck's constant, which is crucial to performing quantum physics calculations. Out of this finding, Albert Einstein was able to explain the photoelectric effect and, subsequently, the field of quantum physics was born. He received the 1918 Nobel Prize in Physics for this work. • Apr. 25, 1900 - Austrian physicist Wolfgang Ernst Pauli is born. Pauli is best known for discovering the "Pauli Exclusion Principle" and extensive work in the concept of spin in particle physics and chemistry. He received the 1945 Nobel Prize in Physics for this work, having been nominated for it by Albert Einstein. • Apr. 22, 1904 - American physicist J. Robert Oppenheimer was born. Oppenheimer is sometimes called "the father of the atomic bomb" because he was the director of the Manhattan Project to develop the first nuclear bomb. • Apr. 25, 1953 - Francis Crick & James D. Watson publish their paper describing the double helix structure of DNA, which was determined largely with the use of x-ray crystallography. • Apr. 24, 1960 - German physicist & Nazi oppositionist Max von Laue died in Berlin. He was awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1914 for his work in discovering the crystial diffraction of x-rays. • Apr. 21, 1994 - Astronomer Alexander Wolszczan announces the first discoveries of extrasolar planets (i.e. planets circling stars other than our Sun). • Apr. 26, 1994 - Physicists announce the first evidence of the top quark, a previously theoretical subatomic particle