Author: Ian

Hans Geiger (1882)

After receiving a doctorate in physics in Germany in 1906, Geiger traveled to England, where he assisted chemist Ernest Rutherford. In 1908, they designed an instrument to detect and count alpha particles, positively charged ionizing particles produced by radioactive decay. He then returned to Germany, directing radiation research at several universities. Two decades later, Geiger developed the sensitive, portable radiation counter that now bears his name. Geiger was a member of what “club”? Discuss

Mozart's The Magic Flute Premieres (1791)

In the final year of his life, prolific composer Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart produced the opera Die Zauberflöte—The Magic Flute—featuring a libretto by the actor Emmanuel Schikaneder. The work is considered a singspiel—an opera in German that contains spoken dialogue and is usually comic in tone. Mozart brought this form of light musical entertainment to a height of lyrical and symbolic art. How much longer did Mozart live after The Magic Flute debuted? Discuss

State Fair of Texas

Not surprisingly, the State Fair of Texas is one of the nation’s biggest state fairs, claiming more than three million visitors to the 200-acre Fair Park in Dallas. The fair began in 1887, and in 1952 Big Tex, its symbol of bigness, arrived. Big Tex is a 52-foot-tall cowboy with a 30-foot chest and 7’8″ biceps, wearing a five-foot-high, 75-gallon cowboy hat. The cowboy stands in the middle of the fairgrounds booming out welcomes and announcements. Among fair events are a college football game, concerts, and parades. Discuss

CERN Is Founded (1954)

Abbreviated as CERN after the original French name, the European Organization for Nuclear Research is the world’s largest particle physics laboratory. CERN’s activities are sponsored by 20 European countries. It was there that the World Wide Web—developed to promote scientific collaboration by facilitating information sharing—was invented in the 1990s. CERN’s latest project, the Large Hadron Collider, is, among other things, being used to discover the hypothesized Higgs boson, which is what? Discuss

Con Man Matthew Cox

A number of years before he was placed on the US Secret Service’s Most Wanted List, bold con man Matthew Cox wrote a novel detailing the exploits of a man who travels across America committing many of the crimes for which Cox himself is currently incarcerated. Cox used approximately 30 aliases in his real life criminal pursuits, including the name of cartoon millionaire C. Montgomery Burns, and acquired between $5 million and $25 million in fraudulent property mortgaging deals. How did he do it? Discuss

László Bíró (1899)

Frustrated by the way his fountain pen’s sharp tip would tear paper and by the amount of time he wasted filling the pen with ink and cleaning up smudges, László Bíró set to work developing a better pen. A Hungarian newspaper editor, he noticed that the ink used in newspaper printing dried quickly and without smudging, but it was too viscous for use with existing pens. With the help of his brother, a chemist, he developed the modern ballpoint pen. How long did it take him to build his pen? Discuss

Vacuum Energy

The composition of vacuum energy, an underlying background energy that exists in space even when that space is devoid of matter, remains one of physics’ great unsolved mysteries. The phenomenon results in the existence of most, if not all, of the fundamental forces, such as gravity and electromagnetism, and many experts suspect that it affects the behavior of the universe on a cosmological scale. What 1948 experiment provided the first experimental verification of the existence of vacuum energy? Discuss