February in Physics History

While I wanted to allocate few minutes every day to write something on a daily life of a typical physicist that, unfortunately, has not taken place since the last 1 month. Today I was reading the APS News on "This Month in Physics History" and realized that they have picked only one out of many news/discoveries that have been made/announced in the month of February. I thought I would share some more here.

1. In 1927, Werner Heisenberg developed the uncertainty principle that is the cornerstone of the Quantum Theories. Heisenberg was just 26 years old. 
2. On February 16, 1928, in a letter to Nature, C. V. Raman and K. S. Krishnan, two Indian physicists, announced their discovery of a new form of the combinational scattering of photons by molecules of the liquids that are excited to higher energy levels. Independently from them L. Landsberg and G Mandelstam from the Soviet Union have also discovered this type of scattering in crystals and have also offered the physics explanation. Today this effect is known as the Raman Scattering largely because of the Nobel Prize award to C. V. Raman, which was quite controversial. Interestingly, Raman was the first Indian physicist who won the Nobel prize, and the second and only other Indian physicist who was awarded the Nobel prize is Raman's nephew, Subrahmanyan Chandrasekhar. 
3. On February of 1931 Landau has written a paper (published in 1932) while on his visits to Zurich in which he calculated the maximum mass of white dwarfs. It was an independent discovery from Chandrasekhar, so was not a newsworthy calculation. However, towards the end of the paper, he also predicted the possible existence of compact stars that contain matter of nuclear density and referred to them as one "gigantic nucleus". Today we refer them to as "neutron stars". At the time neutrons were not discovered yet, therefore it seemed that such stars would violate the laws of Quantum Mechanics (Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle, Localization).
4. In a paper published in Nature on February 27, 1932, James Chadwick announced the discovery of neutrons.
5. In 1967 Jocelyn Bell discovered first neutron stars in the form of pulsars and the announcement was made on February 24, 1968, in a paper published in Nature.Her thesis advisor Antony Hewish went on to receive a Nobler Prize for this discovery in 1974. The exclusion of Jocelyn Bell from Nobel Prize as a co-recipient was quite controversial and was condemned by many physicists and astronomers including the late famous astronomer Fred Hoyle.
6. And very surprisingly the APS has left out the famous discovery of gravitational waves that was announced last year on February 11, 2016, by the LIGO Scientific Collaboration and Virgo Collaboration. The existence of gravitational waves was predicted by Albert Einstein exactly one century ago as an outcome of his theory of General Relativity. The discovery itself was made earlier on September 14, 2015, where two black holes with the masses around 30 solar masses merged to create another, and the resulting gravitational wave signal was captured on Earth by Advanced LIGO detectors. The signal is named as GW150914 (Gravitational Waves 2015, September 14).

I will add later more to this list.

Welcome to my blog!

I have been thinking of opening a blog on daily activities — and hopefully progresses — of a typical physicist. We are not talking about Einstein here, nor Feynman. You will ask, why a blog then, isn't a typical website sufficient to discuss all you wanted to deliver to your already limited audience? Unfortunately, no matter how elegantly you present it on your website, you would still need to squeeze the info so much that at the end it would be just a boring website unless you are a physicist yourself. For example, a homepage, as we say, does not tell very much on how long a physicist spends to get a scientific problem solved. Neither does it tell what obstacles he or she would be experiencing meanwhile. Oh, to make the matter more interesting, it does not tell at all what is like to be a physicist, and here we are on a daily life of a physicist. You may ask questions if you desire, and I would be happy to answer them. Perhaps not all, but we will sort that part out. Welcome to my blog, and welcome me!