1930 - Science

Science

Illinois-born astronomer Clyde W. (William) Tombaugh, 24, at the Lowell Observatory in Flagstaff, Ariz., discovers Pluto February 18 and gives the ninth planet its name. Indiana-born astronomer Vesto (Melvin) Slipher, 54, has organized and directed the search for the planet, whose existence was predicted by William H. Pickering, now 72, and the late Percival Lowell.

Harvard astronomer Annie Jump Cannon completes cataloging and classifying some 400,000 astronomical objects. Now 66, the "Census Taker of the Sky" started her work in 1897.

Chicago's Adler Planetarium opens with a projector manufactured by Carl Zeiss of Jena. First planetarium in the Western Hemisphere, it has been built with a gift from local merchant Max Adler.

The Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton University is established with an initial $5 million endowment from department store magnate Louis Bamberger, 75, and his sister Mrs. Felix Fuld. Abraham Flexner of 1910 Flexner Report fame has urged them to charter a new type of institution dedicated to "the usefulness of useless knowledge"; it will attract such minds as Albert Einstein, J. Robert Oppenheimer, Wolfgang Pauli, and John von Neumann.

Nuclear physicist Wolfgang Pauli sends a letter to fellow scientists attending a conference at Tübingen suggesting the existence of a new neutral particle that would explain the apparent energy nonconservation in the decay of radioactive materials (see 1925). Other physicists will elaborate Pauli's theory in the next few years and conclude that the new particle Pauli has suggested must be extremely light and interact very weakly (see cyclotron, 1932; neutrino, 1956).

An amateur French antiques collector visits Constantinople and buys the palimpsest discovered in 1906 containing a treatise by the mathematician Archimedes (year approximate). The palimpsest will remain in the family's Paris home until 1991.