The Discovery of Nuclear Fission
In the late afternoon of December 17, 1938, in a chemistry laboratory on the outskirts of Berlin, two chemists at the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute…
23 min read
Tag
physics
The Discovery of Quantum Mechanics and Superposition
Among the scientific revolutions of the twentieth century, the discovery of quantum mechanics and the formulation of the superposition principle stand as the most…
22 min read
The Search for Room Temperature Superconductors
Among the scientific holy grails of the modern era, the search for a room-temperature superconductor, a material that conducts electricity with zero resistance at…
22 min read
The Discovery of High-Temperature Superconductors
Among the discoveries of twentieth century physics, the discovery of high-temperature superconductivity by the IBM Zurich research team of Karl Alex Müller and Johannes…
23 min read
Vera Rubin and the Discovery of Dark Matter
For most of the twentieth century, the picture of a galaxy was the picture Edwin Hubble had given the world in the 1920s and…
25 min read
The Discovery of the Higgs Boson at CERN
On the morning of 4 July 2012, in an auditorium at the CERN laboratory in Geneva, the director-general of the laboratory stepped to a…
25 min read
The CERN Large Hadron Collider
A wide concrete cavern opens up beneath the Swiss-French border. Two bright steel cylinders, twenty-five metres long and fifteen wide, hang from overhead cranes…
23 min read
Why So Many Jews in STEM?
Jews make up roughly 0.2 percent of the world’s population, but they have won about 22 percent of all Nobel Prizes, 24 percent of…
20 min read