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| NEWSLETTER - DECEMBER 17 | |
| Before you look at today's web page, see if you can answer some of these questions about the events that happened on this day. Some of the names are very familiar. Others will likely stump you. Tickle your curiosity with these questions, then check your answers on today's web page. | |
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| Quotations for Today | |
| "Once you ask the question, where is the Carbon-14, and where does it go, it's like one, two, three, you have (radiocarbon) dating" - Willard F. Libby (born 17 Dec 1908) "In physical science a first essential step in the direction of learning any subject is to find principles of numerical reckoning and practical methods for measuring some quality connected with it. I often say that when you can measure what you are speaking about and express it in numbers you know something about it; but when you cannot measure it, when you cannot express it in numbers, you knowledge is of a meagre and unsatisfactory kind: it may be the beginning of knowledge, but you have scarcely, in your thoughts, advanced to the stage of science, whatever the matter may be. - William Thomson (died 17 Dec 1907) "The progression of physical science is much more connected with your prosperity than is usually imagined. You owe to experimental philosophy some of the most important and peculiar of your advantages. It is not by foreign conquests chiefly that you are become great, but by a conquest of nature in your own country." - Sir Humphry Davy (born 17 Dec 1778) | |
| QUIZ | |
| Births | |
| Willard Frank Libby, born 17 Dec 1908, was an American chemist who introduced radiocarbon dating with carbon-14. For this development he was honoured with the Nobel Prize for Chemistry in 1960. In 1952, Libby determined that charcoal unearthed at Stonehenge to dated from 1848 BC What is the source of carbon-14 found in organisms? | |
| Arthur Edwin Kennelly, born 17 Dec 1861, was an Irish-American electrical engineer who co-discovered (with Heaviside) the radio reflecting properties of a certain stratum of the atmosphere. Which stratum of the atmosphere did he co-discover? | |
| Sir Humphry Davy, born 17 Dec 1778, was an English chemist who discovered several chemical elements and compounds, invented the miner's safety lamp, and epitomized the scientific method. In 1807, he discovered, and made an isolation of two similar elements with electric current for the first time. Which two elements did he first isolate with electricity? | |
| Deaths | |
| Born as William Thomson (1824-1907) who became an influential physicist, mathematician and engineer has been described as a Newton of his era. His activities ranged from being the brains behind the laying of a transatlantic telephone cable, to attempting to calculate the age of the earth from its rate of cooling. His name was adopted for the units of a temperature scale. In 1892, when raised to the peerage, he chose the name from a river, near Glasgow University, Scotland, where he worked for over a half-century. Can you give the name this physicist took when he became a baron? | |
| Events | |
| On 17 Dec 1903, the first powered flight was achieved by the Wright brothers in the Kitty Hawk, at Kill Devil Hill, North Carolina. The aircraft stayed aloft for 12 seconds. To the nearest 20 feet, how far did the aircraft fly on this occasion? | |
| Answers | |
| When you have your answers ready to all the questions above, you'll find all the information to check them, and more, on the December 17 web page of Today in Science History. Or, try this link first for just the brief answers. | |
| Fast answers for the previous newsletter for December 16: Samoa; ultraviolet; Java Man; the decade containing the year 1954. | |
| Feedback | |
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