1922 | Science
Science
An enzyme discovered in saliva, tears, and other animal secretions by Scottish bacteriologist Alexander Fleming, 41, breaks down bacterial cell walls. Fleming calls his lysozyme "the dissolving enzyme" (see medicine [penicillin], 1928).
Ohio-born Washington University physicist Arthur Holly Compton, 29, explains what will be called the "Compton effect" and prove to be basic to quantum mechanics (see Planck, 1900): X-rays are composed of discrete pulses (quanta) of electronic energy (he calls them photons), which not only have energy and momentum just as material particles do but also have wavelengths, frequencies, and other wave characteristics, their energy being directly proportional to their frequencies and inversely proportional to their wavelengths; when elastically scattered by electrons, the wavelengths of X-rays and other energetic electromagnetic radiations are increased. Individual photons collide with single electrons, the collisions result in a partial transfer of their energy and momentum to the electrons, which recoil, and the collisions also produce new photons containing less energy and momentum (see Debye, 1923).
English archaeologist Charles Leonard Woolley, 42, discovers Ur on the Euphrates River in Iraq, finds Sumerian temple ruins dating to 2600 B.C., and gives historical reality to the ancient Mesopotamian civilization of Sumer of which there has been only legendary knowledge.
English Egyptologist Howard Carter, 49, and his patron George Edward Stanhope Molyneux, 56, earl of Carnarvon, discover the tomb of Egypt's King Tut November 26 at Luxor in the Valley of the Kings (their work has been sponsored in part by the 34-year-old National Geographic Society). Of the 27 pharaohs' tombs near Thebes, only the one of minor 18th Dynasty king Tutankhamen (1335 B.C. to 1323 B.C.) has not been looted.