Today in Science (1021)

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

More like this

February 28th 1704 - Birth of Louis Godin, French astronomer
Births 1867 - Charles Dillon Perrine, American-born astronomer
Births 1814 - Gabriel Auguste Daubrée, French geologist