1948 - Science

Science

Physicist Richard P. Feynman and his erstwhile New York schoolmate Julian Schwinger develop a theory of quantum electrodynamics (QED) that is far more powerful than the Dirac theories of 1926, 1927, and 1928 or the 1927 Heisenberg theory (see Tomonaga, 1943; Feynman, 1944). Together with that of Shinichiro Tomonaga, their work employs a process of "renormalization" to eliminate superfluous infinities, allowing the positive infinities to cancel the negative ones—the theoretically infinite mass and charge of the electron—and define the mass and charge by their measured values. The theory of quantum electronics as thus clarified becomes the most accurate quantum field theory available to science (see Gell-Mann, 1953).

The Palomar Observatory opens 40 miles northeast of San Diego, Calif. Founded by the 57-year-old California Institute of Technology to supplement the Mount Wilson Observatory and financed by the Rockefeller Foundation, its chief feature is the 500-ton Hale telescope, named for the late astronomer George Ellery Hale, who died 10 years ago. The telescope's 14½-ton main mirror measures five meters across and is made of the borosilicate glass Pyrex that has been ground and polished to the proper curvature and then coated with aluminum to give it a durable, highly-reflective surface. Corning Glass Works chemist J. Franklin Hyde, now 45, created a process in the 1930s to take a mineral found in ordinary sand and produce fused silica; it will be used not only in mirrors and telescopes but also in a variety of other applications, including engine sealants and medical devices.

Moscow purges Soviet scientific committees following T. D. Lysenko's denunciation of hostile geneticists.

London-born archaeologist Mary Douglas Leakey (née Nicol), 35, discovers the skeleton of a 1.7-million-year-old dryopithecine (primitive ape) at Rusinga on Lake Victoria (see Dart, 1924). She met African-born archaeologist and anthropologist Louis S. B. Leakey, now 45, in 1934 when she prepared drawings for his book Adam's Ancestors, became his second wife in 1936, and gains international attention for his work with her discovery of Proconsul africanus, an ancestor of both apes and humans who lived about 25 million years ago (see 1959).

Cairo-born Oxford biochemist Dorothy (Mary) Hodgkin (née Crowfoot), 38, and her colleagues use X-ray crystallography to analyze the complex nonprotein structure of the vitamin B12 molecule, one of the largest molecules to be analyzed. The project will take 8 years, Hodgkin will be the first researcher to analyze a complex molecule by X-ray diffraction before its structure is determined by chemical means, and she will go on to analyze the structures of other molecules, including penicillin and insulin (see 1964).

Physicist and astrophysicist Henri-Alexandre Deslandres dies at his native Paris January 15 at age 94; botanist Frederick O. Bower at his native Ripon, Yorkshire, April 11 at age 92.