1946 in science

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The year 1946 in science and technology involved some significant events, listed below.

Biology

• November 10 - Peter Scott opens the Slimbridge Wetland Reserve in England.
• Karl von Frisch publishes "Die Tänze der Bienen" ("The dances of the bees").

Computer science

• February 14–15 - ENIAC, the first non-classified all-electronic Turing complete computer, built under the direction of J. Presper Eckert and John Mauchly, is announced and dedicated at the University of Pennsylvania's Moore School of Electrical Engineering. It is programmable by plugboard and uses conditional branching.
• December 11 - Frederick Williams receives a patent for a random-access memory device.

Medicine

• July 14 - Dr Benjamin Spock's The Common Sense Book of Baby and Child Care is first published in New York; it becomes one of the biggest best-sellers of all time.
• Harold Gillies begins to perform sex reassignment surgery on Michael Dillon, including the first female-to-male transsexual phalloplasty.
• Chance Brothers of Smethwick, England, produce the first all-glass syringe with interchangeable barrel and plunger, allowing easy mass-sterilisation of components.

Physics

• January 1 - Atomic Energy Research Establishment established at Harwell, Oxfordshire under John Cockroft.
• The BBGKY hierarchy of equations for s-particle distribution functions is applied to the derivation of kinetic equations by Nikolay Bogolyubov in a paper received in July 1945 and published in 1946 in Russian and in English. The related kinetic transport theory is considered by John Gamble Kirkwood in a paper received in October 1945 and published in March 1946. The first paper by Max Born and Herbert S. Green considering a general kinetic theory of liquids is received in February 1946 and published on 31 December 1946.

Awards

• Nobel Prizes
  • Physics - Percy Williams Bridgman
  • Chemistry - James B. Sumner, John Howard Northrop, Wendell Meredith Stanley
  • Medicine - Hermann Joseph Muller

Births

• May 11 - Robert Jarvik, co-inventor of the Jarvik-7 artificial heart
• October 14 - Kay Redfield Jamison, clinical psychologist
• June 24 - Ellison Onizuka (died 1986), astronaut
• July 2 - Richard Axel, physiologist, Nobel prize winner
• September 7 - Francisco Varela (died 2001), biologist and philosopher
• September 28 - Morinobu Endo, chemist
• December 31 - Roy Porter (died 2002), medical historian

Deaths

• March 8 - Frederick W. Lanchester (born 1868), automotive engineer.
• March 23 - Gilbert N. Lewis (born 1875), chemist; first to isolate deuterium.
• March 26 - Gerhard Heilman (born 1859), paleo-ornithologist.
• May 2 - Simon Flexner (born 1863), pathologist and bacteriologist.
• June 14 - John Logie Baird (born 1888), inventor.
• August 13 - H. G. Wells (born 1866), scientific populariser.
• September 16 - James Hopwood Jeans (born 1877), mathematician and scientist.
• October 2 - Ignacy Mościcki (born 1867), chemist and President of Poland.
• October 4 - Barney Oldfield (born 1878), automobile racer.
• Israel Aharoni (born 1882), zoologist.