| Wednesday, October 7, 2009 |
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| Niels Bohr |
Answer of the DayAre genetics responsible for making a whole family of brilliant scientists? Nature or nurture? Christian Bohr was a professor of physiology who postulated the Bohr effect. He and his wife had two sons. Niels, born on this date in 1885, was a Nobel Prize-winning physicist who is considered a father of quantum mechanics. The Bohr atom is named for him. Their second son, Harald, was a mathematician who developed the field of almost periodic functions. The year that Neils won his Nobel Prize, 1922, his fourth son, Aage Niels Bohr, was born. Following in his father's footsteps, Aage also became a noted physicist. His research on the structure of the atomic nucleus earned him a 1975 Nobel Prize in Physics, shared with James Rainwater and Benjamin Mottelson.
Quote"An expert is a man who has made all the mistakes which can be made in a very narrow field."
Word of the daytoffee-nosed
(British) snobbish; pretentiously superior
George Bernard Shaw pithily observed, "England and America are two countries separated by a common language." For the next fortnight, we'll examine words that are current in the UK but may be unfamiliar to the average American.
Today's History
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| T.S. Eliot |
- Battle of Lepanto: victory of Christians over Ottoman Empire (1571)
- Cats: long-running musical based on T.S. Eliot's poems opened on Broadway (1982)
- Achille Lauro: Italian ship was hijacked by Palestinian terrorists; Leon Klinghoffer, a wheelchair-bound passenger, was killed the next day (1985)
Today's Birthdays
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| Vladimir Putin |
- Desmond Tutu (78): South African cleric who won a Nobel Prize for his work against apartheid
- John Mellencamp (58): rocker; musicians Al Martino (82), Kevin Godley (64), Tico Torres (56), Yo-Yo Ma (54) and Thom Yorke (41) were also born on this date
- Vladimir Putin (57): prime minister of Russia
- Simon Cowell (50): critical judge on American Idol; American Idol winner Taylor Hicks (33) shares his birth date
- Rachel McAdams (33): actor, The Notebook, The Time Traveler's Wife; also, actor Dylan Baker (50)
