^
Births
which occurred on a 14 October:
1983 The Inclusive Language Lectionary is issued
by the National Council of Churches. In it, scripture readings are translated
to omit or blur gender references. God is thus called "Father and Mother"
or "the One"; and "mankind" was replaced by "humanity" or "humankind.
The translation would prove shortlived. 1938 John W. Dean
III, White House counsel, Watergate figure 1916
C. Everett Koop, US Surgeon General.(1981-1989)
^
1914 Raymond Davis Jr., US astrophysicist,
who shared one half of the 2002 Nobel Prize in Physics with Masatoshi
Koshiba (Japan) [19 Sep 1926~] “for pioneering contributions to astrophysics,
in particular for the detection of cosmic neutrinos”. The other half
went to Riccardo Giacconi (USA) [06
Oct 1931~]. By the end of 2002 Davis had become significantly
disabled by Alzheimer's disease. Davis
had written this autobiographical note:
I was born in Washington, DC. My father was a photographer at the
National Bureau of Standards. A self-educated man, he never finished
high school, but, in his career at the National Bureau of Standards,
he made many useful inventions, and eventually became chief of the
Photographic Technology Section. His early influence led me in the
direction of individual experimentation and designing my own apparatus.
My mother, Ida Rogers Younger, was a native of the state of Virginia.
She taught me to enjoy music, although she never succeeded in making
me a performer. It was to please her that I spent several years as
a choirboy, in spite of my inability to carry a tune. A bit later
in life, I took pleasure in attending outdoor concerts at the Watergate,
in the days before air traffic grew heavy enough to drown out the
music.
My constant companion in childhood
was my brother Warren, only 14 months my junior. Together we played
street games on summer evening, paddled a canoe on the Potomac and,
after my release from the choir, spent many weekends rifle-shooting
with our father. In high school and college, I gathered a number of
medals for marksmanship, but I have long since abandoned this activity,
having concluded that the world would be a better place with fewer
sharpshooters.
As my brother and I grew older, our
interests diverged. He headed for a military career, while I became
more interested in science. My father encouraged my interest, bringing
me chemicals for my basement experiments, and helping me become a
reasonably good photographer. My favorite reading matter was Smithsonian
reports on many phases of science, obtained at my local branch library.
Washington offered many educational opportunities for curious young
minds.
I was educated in the Washington public
schools, and attended the University of Maryland as a day student,
graduating in 1938 with a degree in chemistry. After working for the
Dow Chemical Company in Midland, Michigan for a year, I returned to
the University of Maryland to take a Master's degree, before going
on to Yale to pursue a doctorate. In 1942, I received my Ph.D. in
physical chemistry, and immediately entered the Army as a reserve
officer. Most of my war years were spent at Dugway Proving Ground
in Utah, observing chemical weapons tests and, in my spare hours,
exploring and photographing the surrounding territory, which included
the Great Salt Lake and geologic evidence for its much larger predecessor,
Lake Bonneville.
Upon my discharge from the Army in
1945, I went to work at the Monsanto Chemical Company's Mound Laboratory,
in Miamisburg, Ohio, doing applied radiochemistry of interest to the
Atomic Energy Commission. In the spring of 1948, I was able to join
the newly created Brookhaven National Laboratory, which was dedicated
to finding peaceful uses for atomic energy. In my first few months
at Brookhaven, I lived at the Lindenmere, a summer hotel which had
been leased by the laboratory to provide housing for new arrivals.
It was there that I met my future wife, Anna Torrey, who was also
employed at Brookhaven, in the Biology Department. Since this was
a seaside community, I decided to build my own sailboat. This notion
was viewed with scorn by most of my acquaintances but, with Anna's
help, I built a 21-foot sloop, the Halcyon, which gave our family
many years of pleasure. Now in the hands of her third owner, the Halcyon
still sails the Great South Bay. Anna and I were married in late 1948
and, over the next fifteen years, five children were born to us: Andrew,
a senior scientist at the University of Chicago who studies meteorites
to learn about stars and the early history of the solar system, lives
in River Forest, Illinois; Martha Kumler, a private tutor of high
school students, lives in Honeoye Falls, New York; Nancy Klemm, a
homemaker and restorer of windows in old houses, lives in Webster
Groves, Missouri; Roger, a mechanical technician working on the Relativistic
Heavy Ion Collider at Brookhaven National Laboratory, lives in Center
Moriches, New York; and Alan, an engineer with Boeing, lives in Seattle,
Washington. Among them, they have given us eleven grandchildren. We
have lived in the same house, in Blue Point, New York, for over fifty
years.
My first act, on arriving at Brookhaven, was to report to the chairman
of the Chemistry Department, Richard Dodson, and ask him what I was
expected to do. To my surprise and delight, I was advised to go to
the library, do some reading and choose a project of my own, whatever
appealed to me. Thus began a long career of doing just what I wanted
to do and getting paid for it. In the library, I read a 1948 review
paper by H. R. Crane in Reviews of Modern Physics which led me to
decide on an experiment in neutrino physics, a field in which little
was known at the time, and which seemed well-suited to my background
in physical chemistry.
In early experiments, I attempted to
detect neutrinos from a reactor, using the chlorine-argon detection
method suggested by Bruno Pontecorvo (in 1946). In this method, a
37Cl atom reacts with a neutrino to make an 37Ar atom. Argon is a
noble gas and is easy to separate chemically from a large amount of
chlorine-rich solvent. It is radioactive with a half-life of 35 days
and can be counted with a gas-filled proportional counter. A first
attempt, exposing a 1000-gallon tank of carbon tetrachloride at the
Brookhaven Graphite Research Reactor, failed to detect any signal,
as the neutrino flux at this reactor was too small to affect a target
of this size. Furthermore, a reactor emits antineutrinos, and the
Pontecorvo method only detects neutrinos. It was not known at that
time that the two particles were not identical. Later, I built larger
experiments, using one of the Savannah River reactors as the neutrino
source. I eventually set a limit on the neutrino flux that was a factor
of 20 below the antineutrino flux measured by Reines and Cowan in
their elegant experiment that won Fred Reines his Nobel Prize.
Other early interests included the
development, with Oliver Schaeffer, of a method of geological dating
using 36Cl in surface rocks. With the later advent of accelerator
mass spectrometry, this has become a useful tool in geochemistry,
but our counting techniques were not sensitive enough to make the
method work. We turned to measuring 36Cl in meteorites. Measuring
the 36Cl radioactivity and the total accumulated decay product, 36Ar,
in a meteorite allowed us to determine how long the meteorite had
been exposed in space. Our interest in meteorite exposure ages continued
for many years. We also worked on measuring cosmic-ray production
of 37Ar and 39Ar in a variety of freshly fallen meteorites. Our greatest
success in this work was with the Lost City meteorite. The track of
this meteorite was photographed as it fell, allowing its orbit to
be determined. Our measurement of radioactive argon isotopes allowed
us to deduce the cosmic ray intensity gradient in the inner solar
system. During the era of the moon landings, I was involved in measuring
37Ar, 39Ar, tritium and 222Rn in lunar rocks and in the lunar atmosphere
(trapped in the rock boxes brought back by the astronauts). During
processing of the Apollo 12 samples, one of the glove boxes in Houston
leaked and I had the interesting experience of being quarantined with
the astronauts and a few other unlucky scientists for two weeks until
it was clear that we were not infected with any lunar diseases.
Following the Savannah River experiments,
I began thinking about detecting neutrinos from the Sun. The first
step was a pilot experiment located 2300 feet underground in the Barberton
Limestone Mine, near Akron, Ohio. Observing neutrinos from the Sun
had the potential of testing the theory that the hydrogen-helium fusion
reactions are the source of the Sun's energy. In the 1950s, however,
the proton-proton chain of reactions was believed to be the principal
neutrino source, but this chain only emitted low-energy neutrinos,
below the threshold of the chlorine-argon reaction.
A new measurement of the nuclear reaction
3He+4Heg7Be+g by Holmgren and Johnston in 1958, suggested that one
of the terminal reactions in the proton-proton chain would produce
energetic neutrinos which could be measured by the chlorine-argon
radiochemical method. Encouraged by these developments, and with the
support of the Brookhaven National Laboratory and the U.S. Atomic
Energy Commission, I built a much larger experiment in the Homestake
Gold Mine in Lead, South Dakota. The detector itself consisted of
a 100'000-gallon tank filled with perchloroethylene, a solvent most
commonly used for dry cleaning of clothing. The experiment was located
nearly a mile underground, at the 4850 foot level of the mine. Initially,
we observed no solar neutrino signal and expressed our results only
as upper limits. Subsequent refinements in technique and, particularly,
in counting methods, continued over the years, producing a solar neutrino
signal approximately one-third of the expected flux from the standard
solar model calculated by John Bahcall. This was the genesis of the
so-called "solar neutrino problem".
The solar neutrino problem caused great
consternation among physicists and astrophysicists. My opinion in
the early years was that something was wrong with the standard solar
model; many physicists thought there was something wrong with my experiment.
Years of measurements produced consistent answers and many tests showed
that there were no problems with experimental procedures. Many distinguished
physicists suggested explanations for the low solar neutrino flux
that now seem fanciful. Trevor Pinch, a sociologist, made a study
of how scientists responded to the solar neutrino problem. The disagreement
between the measured solar neutrino flux and that predicted by the
standard solar model was confirmed for energetic 8B neutrinos by the
Kamiokande II experiment in the late 1980s and for the lower energy
pp neutrinos by the gallium experiments GALLEX and SAGE in the middle
1990s. Only recently, observations at the Sudbury Neutrino Observatory
(SNO) in the Inco Nickel Mine in Sudbury, Ontario, Canada, have indicated
that, indeed, the total number of solar neutrinos emitted agrees with
the standard solar model prediction, but that two-thirds of the neutrinos
change in the course of their journey to the Earth into other flavors
(m and t neutrinos), a phenomenon known as neutrino oscillation. Only
electron neutrinos can be detected with the Cl-Ar radiochemical method.
I retired from Brookhaven in 1984,
but wasn't ready to give up measuring solar neutrinos, because I thought
it important that the Homestake experiment measure the solar neutrino
flux at the same time as new solar neutrino experiments. I transferred
administration of the Homestake experiment to the University of Pennsylvania
and have been a Research Professor there since that time. The experiment
continued to measure the solar neutrino flux until the late 1990s,
when the Homestake Mine ceased operating.
Meanwhile, to my surprise, a whole
new field of neutrino physics has developed in directions I never
imagined in the Homestake days. |
1906 Hannah Arendt Germany, historian (Origins of Totalitarianism)
1905 Eugene Fodor, Hungarian-born travel writer.
1894 (Edward Estlin) e. e. cummings, Cambridge Mass, poet
(Tulips & Chimneys), playwright (Him, Santa Claus); writer (The Enormous
Room). He died on 03 September 1962. 1890 Dwight David "Ike"
Eisenhower Denison, Tx (R) 5-star US army general: Supreme Commander
of Allied Forces in World War II; 34th US President (1953-1961) He died
on 28 March 1969. 1888 Katherine Mansfield New Zealand,
short story writer (Aloe, Garden Party) 1884 Transparent
paper-strip photographic film is patented by George Eastman.
1882 Eamon DeValera, NY, Irish politician and patriot;
prime minister (1932-1948; 1951-1954) and president (1957-1959). He died
on 29 August 1975. 1868 Padoa,
mathematician 1867 Masaoka Shiki Japan, haiku &
tanka poet/diarist (Salt Water Ballads)
^
1857 Elwood Haynes, in Portland,
Indiana, inventor, automotive pioneer, built one of 1st US autos .
After being trained as an engineer
and a chemist at John Hopkins University, Haynes returned to his native
Indiana and began experimenting on a carriage powered by an internal
engine. In 1894, he completed construction on one of America's earliest
automobiles, a one-horsepower, one-cylinder vehicle, and on Independence
Day of that year drove it through the streets of Kokomo, Indiana,
on its trial run. Today, this automobile is preserved in the Smithsonian
Institution as the oldest US automobile in existence. For the next
few decades, Haynes continued to make improvements to the new science
of automobile manufacturing, including a successful carburetor, the
first use of aluminum in automobile engines, and the first muffler.
Haynes died on 13 April 1925. |
1824 Adolphe Joseph Thomas Monticelli, Marseille painter
who died on 29 June 1886. MORE
ON MONTICELLI AT ART 4 OCTOBER
with links to images. 1808 Simon Saint-Jean, French
painter, specialized in still life and flowers, who died on 03 July 1860.
MORE
ON SAINT~JEAN AT ART 4 OCTOBER
with links to images. 1801 Plateau,
mathematician.
^
1784 Ferdinand VII “Fernando
el Deseado”, king of Spain in 1808 and from 1814 until his 29
September 1833 death. Between 1808 and 1813, during the Napoleonic
Wars, Ferdinand was imprisoned in France by Napoléon. [Click
image for portrait by Goya >]
Ferdinand was the son of Charles IV and Maria Luisa of Parma, who
placed their whole confidence in Manuel de Godoy. From 1795 Godoy
had flaunted the title of prince of the Peace for his capitulation
to France in the Peace of Basel. Ferdinand's tutor stirred up his
jealousy and encouraged him to seek the protection of Napoleon. Charles
IV was sufficiently alarmed to arrest Ferdinand but forgave him. When
Godoy allowed French troops to enter Spain, Charles was overthrown
by the Revolt of Aranjuez (17 Mar 1808), and he abdicated in favor
of Ferdinand. However, French troops occupied Madrid, and Napoléon
summoned Ferdinand to the frontier and obliged him to return the crown
to his father, who granted it to Napoléon. Napoléon
made his brother Joseph Bonaparte king of Spain and held Fe
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rdinand
in France for the duration of the war.
It was left to the Spanish populace to rise against the French invaders
in the name of the “desired” but absent Ferdinand. In
1812 independent Spaniards adopted the Constitution of Cádiz,
but in December 1813 Napoléon released Ferdinand expressly
to overthrow it. When Ferdinand returned to Spain in 1814 he was urged
by reactionaries to abolish the Cortes of Cádiz and all its
works, which he did almost immediately. He resumed his obsolete powers
and attempted to recover control of Spanish America, now partly independent.
But his ministers could neither reinforce his armies in America nor
persuade the British government to collaborate or connive at reconquest.
In 1820 a liberal revolutionrestored the Constitution of 1812, which
Ferdinand accepted, but in 1823 Louis XVIII of France sent the duc
d'Angoulême at the head of a large army to release Ferdinand
from his radical ministers. Ferdinand's new government arrested the
radicals or drove them into exile. By 1826 the Spanish possessions
in America were all independent. Ferdinand's government now depended
on a militia, the Royalist Volunteers, and the French forces of occupation.
Ferdinand had no children from his
three marriages, and his absolutist supporters looked to his even
more absolutist younger brother, Don Carlos (Carlos María Isidro
de Borbón) [29 Mar 1788 – 10 Mar 1855], to succeed him.
In 1830 his fourth wife, María Cristina [27 Apr 1806 –
23 Aug 1878], gave birth to a daughter, the future Isabella II [10
Oct 1830 – 09 Apr 1904]. Isabella's birth prompted Ferdinand
to revoke the Salic Law of Succession, which prevented women from
acceding to the throne. During Ferdinand's illness, Don Carlos tried
to persuade the queen to recognize his rights, but Ferdinand recovered,
banished Don Carlos, and looked for moderate liberal support for his
young daughter. When Ferdinand, Isabella was recognized as the sovereign,
but his widow was obliged to lean on the liberals as Don Carlos asserted
his claims from Portugal and thus began the First Carlist War. |
1722
Johann Heinrich Tischbein, German artist who died on 22 August
1789. MEHR
ÜBER TISCHBEIN AM ART 4 OCTOBER
with links to images. 1712 George Grenville, English
first lord of the Treasury (1763-65). He died on 13 November 1770.
1687 Robert
Simson, Scottish mathematician who died on 01 October 1768.
He worked mostly at restoring the work of the early Greek geometers, such
as Euclid
and Apollonius
of Perga. The Simson line is erroneously named after him; it appears nowhere
in his work, but is due to a theorem of William
Wallace: If P is a point on the circle circumscribed to a triangle,
the feet of the perpendiculars to the three side of the triangle lie on
a straight line, the Simson line. [diagram >]
1644 William Penn, English Quaker leader and founder of Pennsylvania
as a haven for Quakers. He died on 30 July 1718. 1633 James
II king of England (1685-88) who died on 06 September 1701.
1618 Sir Peter Lely (original name Pieter van der Faes),
Dutch English Baroque
portrait painter known for his Van
Dyck-influenced likenesses of the mid-17th-century English aristocracy..
He died in 1680. MORE
ON LELY AT ART 4 OCTOBER
with links to images. 1593 Cornelis Janssens van Ceulen,
Dutch artist who died in 1664 or 1665. MORE
ON JANSSENS AT ART 4 OCTOBER
with links to images. |