Top 10 science anniversaries in 2020
2020, the International Year of Good Vision, is also a good year for scientific anniversaries. As usual, there are the birthday anniversaries, offering an opportunity to recognize some of the great scientists of the past for their contributions to humankind’s collective knowledge. And there are the anniversaries of accomplishments, discoveries or events that left the world a different place than it had been before. There’s even an Einstein anniversary, which there almost always is. What’s more, by selecting the Top 10 anniversaries carefully, you can illustrate how often key scientific concepts are intertwined — neutrons with bombs, for example, or magnetism with X-rays with DNA. So here, without any deep meaning to the order of presentation, are the Top 10 Science Anniversaries in 2020: 10. Roger Bacon, 800th birthday Nobody knows for sure exactly when Bacon was born, but a passage in his writings suggests that it was around 1220. He was among the premier natural philosophers of his day; he studied first at...