18 JANUARY 2007
Before getting too deeply into the new year, it's always a good idea
to look ahead and prepare for remembrance of deserving events. So get
ready to mark your calendars, for 2007 has some noteworthy anniversaries
to celebrate.
Most significant on this year's list of days to remember is October 4, the 50th
anniversary of the launch of Sputnik in 1957. It was the first Soviet satellite
in space (rather than among bordering countries) and the first artificial object
to orbit the Earth. Ironically, Sputnik didn't do as much for the Soviets as
it did for America. Fear of Soviet 
superiority revitalized U.S. science, inspiring boosts in federal funding and societal support for science and science education.
We could use another Sputnik today. With better science education, more people would appreciate some of the other milestone birthdays coming up this year. Consider, for instance, Sir Charles Sherrington, whose 150th birthday arrives on Nov. 27. He is hardly a household name, but you couldn't remember anybody's name without synapses, the connections between nerve cells in your brain. Sherrington coined the term synapse and won a Nobel prize for his investigations into the workings of the nervous system. (So also mark down Dec. 10, which this year will be the 75th anniversary of the presentation of his prize.)
Another 150th birthday this year celebrates a truly household name, although it is usually preceded by mega- or giga- rather than Heinrich.
Hertz, the unit of frequency, is named for the German physicist Heinrich
Hertz,
born in 1857 on Feb. 22. Hertz is 
most famous for producing radio waves
in a laboratory before anybody knew what radio was (or would someday become
-- otherwise he would have kept it a secret). Hertz thereby confirmed James
Clerk Maxwell's theory of electromagnetism, at the time (the late 1880s) still
not universally accepted. Hertz died tragically young, in 1894 at the age of
36, so he was never eligible to win a Nobel prize (first awarded in 1901).
On the other hand, Dmitri Mendeleyev, the famous Russian chemist, was eligible for a Nobel, because he didn't die until 1907 -- the 100th anniversary of his death coming on Jan. 20. His invention of the periodic table certainly deserved the prize for chemistry, but he apparently missed out by a narrow vote the year before he died.
A Nobel prize was awarded, though, to Hideki Yukawa, whose 100th birthday will be celebrated Jan. 23. In 1935 Yukawa,
a Japanese physicist, figured out how the particles in an atomic nucleus are
held together, and deduced that the "glue" was made of an unknown particle, 200 times or so heavier than an electron. 
Shortly after his 1935 prediction, a particle matching that general description was found in cosmic rays. But that particle (now called the muon) was worthless as nuclear glue, so Yukawa had to wait till 1947 for the right particle (the pion) to be found. He had to wait only two more years to get his Nobel prize.
Another atomic physicist would have turned 100 this year, namely Sir Rudolf Peierls, born on June 5, 1907 in Germany. In the 1930s he moved to England. In 1940, less than a year and a half after nuclear fission was discovered, Peierls explained to the British government (in a memo co-written with Otto Frisch) how it would be possible to make a nuclear bomb using rather small amounts of the rare isotope of uranium known as U-235. Good thing he didn't stay in Germany.
On the other hand, the Swiss mathematician Leonhard Euler, whose 300th birthday is April 15, decided to relocate to Germany from Russia, where he had moved as a young man. It turned out that his time in Russia paid later benefits. When Russian soldiers occupied Berlin in 1760, they were ordered to make sure Euler's house was left alone. Euler was one of the most prolific mathematicians of all time, famous, among other things, for working out all sorts of weird stuff about the square root of negative numbers.
Even more noteworthy, Euler wrote a popular science book that was widely read
for decades, an accomplishment that should serve as a reminder that some important
non-scientists deserve to have their birthdays remembered, too. 
In particular,
Feb. 11 marks the 350th birthday of Bernard de Fontenelle, a French writer. And why, you ask, of all the writers in
the world, should his birthday stand out? Because, of course, he was a SCIENCE
writer -- his book "Conversations on the Plurality of Worlds," first published in 1686, provided the pubic with a popular account of the new scientific understanding of the cosmos that had been revealed by telescopes over the preceding decades. Isaac Asimov, himself an acclaimed science popularizer of modern times, once wrote that Fontenelle "was perhaps the first person to make a reputation in science on the basis of his popular science writing alone."
And that makes his, in a way, the most important birthday of all to celebrate -- for without the tradition he inspired, there'd be no way for you to find about all these other important anniversaries.
E-mail: tsiegfried@nasw.org
