Events
1983 - The metre is defined at the seventeenth General Conference on Weights and Measures in terms of the speed of light as the distance light travels in a vacuum in 1/299,792,458 of a second.
2003 - Images of the dwarf planet Eris are taken and subsequently used in its discovery by the team of Michael E. Brown, Chad Trujillo, and David L. Rabinowitz.
Births
1660 - Georg Ernst Stahl, German scientist
1833 - Alfred Nobel, Swedish inventor and founder of the Nobel Prize
1957 - Wolfgang Ketterle, German physicist and Nobel Prize laureate
Deaths
1872 - Jacques Babinet, French physicist
Humanities & Social Science
