Today in Science (1214)

Events

1782 - The Montgolfier brothers first balloon lifts on its first test flight.

1900 - Max Planck presents a theoretical derivation of his black-body radiation law.

1962 - Mariner 2 becomes the first spacecraft to fly by Venus.

Births

1909 - Edward Tatum, American geneticist and Nobel Prize laureate

1922 - Nikolay Basov, Soviet physicist and Nobel Prize laureate

Deaths

1873 - Louis Agassiz, Swiss-born American zoologist and geologist [See last year’s post on Agassiz]

More like this

Events 1936 - Alan Turing submits On Computable Numbers for publication. Births 1676 - Jacopo Riccati, Italian mathematician 1738 - Joseph-Ignace Guillotin, French physician 1807 - Louis Agassiz, Swiss-born zoologist and geologist 1836 - Alexander Mitscherlich, German chemist 1872 - Marian…
Events 1900 - Max Planck discovers the law of black body emission. 1972 - Apollo 17, the last Apollo moon mission, is launched. The crew take the photograph known as "The Blue Marble" (above) as they leave the Earth. 1995 - The Galileo spacecraft arrives at Jupiter, a little more than six years…
Events 1609 - Galileo Galilei demonstrates his first telescope to Venetian lawmakers. 1894 - Shibasaburo Kitasato discovers the infectious agent of the bubonic plague and publishes his findings in The Lancet. 1981 - Voyager 2 spacecraft makes its closest approach to Saturn 1989 - Voyager 2…
Today is the anniversary of the death, in 1873, of the Swiss-born American zoologist and geologist, Louis Agassiz (born in 1807) whom I've mentioned before. It is fair to say that Agassiz was the last intellectually respectable creationist in America. A vehement anti-evolutionist and polygenist,…