Events
1983 - The metre is defined at the seventeenth General Conference on Weights and Measures in terms of the speed of light as the distance light travels in a vacuum in 1/299,792,458 of a second.
2003 - Images of the dwarf planet Eris are taken and subsequently used in its discovery by the team of Michael E. Brown, Chad Trujillo, and David L. Rabinowitz.
Births
1660 - Georg Ernst Stahl, German scientist
1833 - Alfred Nobel, Swedish inventor and founder of the Nobel Prize
1957 - Wolfgang Ketterle, German physicist and Nobel Prize laureate
Deaths
1872 - Jacques Babinet, French physicist
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So what are these?
Events
1882 - Robert Koch announces the discovery of the bacterium responsible for tuberculosis (mycobacterium tuberculosis; seen above
in culture).
1965 - Ranger 9, equipped to convert its signals into a form suitable for showing on domestic television, brings images of the…
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2001 - A hydrogen atmosphere is discovered on the extrasolar planet Osiris by the Hubble Space Telescope, the first atmosphere detected on an extrasolar planet.
2005 - The first partial human face transplant is completed in Amiens, France.
Births
1701 - Anders Celsius, Swedish inventor and…
Events
1953 - Francis Crick and James D. Watson publish Molecular structure of nucleic acids:
a structure for deoxyribose nucleic acid describing the double helix structure of DNA.
Births
1710 - James Ferguson, Scottish astronomer
1849 - Felix Klein, German mathematician
1874 - Guglielmo…
Somebody asked a question at the Physics Stack Exchange site about the speed of light and the definition of the meter that touches on an issue I think is interesting enough to expand on a little here.
The questioner notes that the speed of light is defined to be 299,792,458 m/s and the meter is…