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Golden Age of Particle Physics: The so-called Particle Zoo (the mu lepton, mesons, and particles with strange quarks) is discovered in cosmic rays.

Soviet military support to the Chinese; the Soviet contribution, which remained largely secret until the fall of the USSR in 1991, is estimated at 50,000 men and hundreds of aircraft and artillery; Soviet aid ends when American military aid to the Chinese begins

General Francisco Franco’s uprising begins the Spanish Civil War

Gerhard Domagk’s Prontosil saved Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s life in 1936. Prontosil would then be featured in the New York Times, and sales skyrocketed. The human body splits Prontosil in two to produce sulfonamide, which interferes with the synthesis of folic acid, essential for cell replication,

Soviet Union. After a promising start in the 1920s with the Gas Dynamics Lab in St. Petersburg, and even a science fiction film with Tsiolkovsky’s consultancy, Soviet research was abruptly halted by a wave of Stalinist purges. In 1936, the leaders of the missile program

The Hindenburg airship makes 10 flights in New Jersey and 7 in Rio de Janeiro.

Hermann Goring takes control of the German military machine

American actors Robert Kike and Louise Garrett built a couple of bungalows in the uninhabited area called Kuta in Bali; they also began teaching surfing to the locals; by word of mouth, Kuta soon became a tourist destination and after the war mass tourism exploded.

Leo Szilard tries in vain to convince Niels Bohr and Enrico Fermi that nuclear fission is possible and dangerous and therefore research in this direction must be placed under government control.

Nobel Prize in Physics to Carl David Anderson for the discovery of the positron

Fermi publishes “On the Motion of Neutrons in Hydrogenous Substances” on Ricerca Scientifica

Amaldi and Fermi publish “On the Absorption and the Diffusion of Slow Neutrons” in Physical Review

Soviet Union. The official Communist Party newspaper, Pravda (Truth), features a front-page photo of a smiling Joseph Stalin holding seven-year-old Gelya Marzikova in his arms. In the following months, Gelya’s father is arrested on false charges and executed in 1938. Gelya and her mother are

The Italian war of conquest in Ethiopia ends

Italian East Africa (AOI). There were 300,000 soldiers present, about a third of whom were Askaris. This number dropped to just 55,000 in 1939. There were also 100,000 militarized workers and 50,000 Blackshirts of the Voluntary Militia for National Security. Public employees were thought to

Robert J. Oppenheimer works in Berkeley and knows Jean Tatlock and Haakan Chevalier of the Communist Party

Albert Einstein chooses a new assistant: the mathematician Leopold Infeld, who will assist him from 1936 to 1938, along with Nathan Rosen. Nathan Rosen will take over in 1944.

Berlin Olympics

Autarchy begins in Italy

Mr. Godman, after noticing that many customers in his supermarket in Oklahoma stopped shopping simply because their shopping bags were full, invented the shopping cart.

Philosopher Jean Paul Sartre publishes “The Transcendence of the Ego” and “Imagination”.

Konrad Zuse, a German, creates a programmable digital vacuum tube machine

United States. The top tax is above 77%, and is even above 90% for half of this period, mostly during the 1950s, under solid Republican leadership (!). It will then be brought down to 70% by the Democrats (!) in 1965, and then will continue

Kodak markets the color camera

Alan Turing publishes his most important paper: “On computable numbers with an application to the Entscheidungsproblem,” introducing what will be remembered as the Turing Machine and the Universal Turing Machine, which are the basis of every digital computer.

Alan Turing began his PhD at Princeton University. He returned to England in 1938.

Nobel Prize in Physics to Sir James Chadwick for the discovery of the neutron

Nobel Prize in Chemistry awarded to Frederic Joliot and Irene Curie for the discovery of artificial radioactivity.

Hideki Yukawa predicts the existence of pions (up and anti-down or down and anti-up quarks)

Schrodinger’s Cat Thought Experiment

Schrodinger speaks explicitly of entanglement between particles

At Corbino’s suggestion, Fermi’s group presents Italian Patent No. 324 458 on the use of slow neutrons to have them absorbed by other atomic nuclei.

Ethiopia stands alone. The League of Nations votes to impose deliberately ineffective economic sanctions against Fascist Italy for invading Ethiopia. Measures that would have prevented the invasion, such as an oil embargo against Italy and the closure of the Suez Canal, were not adopted for

The Italian army invades Ethiopia, and also uses toxic gas (mustard gas)

Irene Curie, Marie Curie’s daughter and her first pupil, wins the Nobel Prize. She is the second woman to win it, after her mother, also sharing the prize with her husband. In 1939, Marguerite Perey also won the prize for the discovery of francium.

Aleksei Grigor’evic Stakhanov collected 102 tons of coal in just 5 hours and 45 minutes; his example gave rise to a movement called the “Stakhanovites.”

The British put into operation the J Machine, a machine to decrypt the Japanese diplomatic code.

Albert Einstein chooses a new assistant: the mathematician Nathan Rosen, who will assist him from 1935 to 1945.

Rome. Countess Carina Negrone achieved a new record by reaching an altitude of 12,043 meters with the same aircraft previously used by Donati, setting a new world record, surpassing Hilsz’s previous record by a full 754 meters. The record, for propeller-driven aircraft, remains unbeaten in

Alan Turing became a Fellow of King’s College at just 22.

American scientist Irving Langmuir, in collaboration with scientist Katherine Blodgett and based on the studies of another scientist, Agnes Pockels, created the Langmuir tank in which, by releasing a known quantity of oily material into water, it expands into a patch until it reaches the

Soviet Union. Trofym Lysenko advocates non-genetic inheritance and denounces genetics as a capitalist pseudoscience. Lysenkoism will cause famines and disasters, first in the USSR and then in Mao’s China, resulting in millions of deaths through misguided and harmful policies. And 3,000 renowned biologists and geneticists

The average American’s spending on necessities is 60% of their income. This will gradually decline to 35% of their income in 2015.

Charles Richter (of the Californian Institute of Technology – CalTech), published the famous article “An Instrumental Earthquake Magnitude Scale” in the Bulletin of the Sesmological Society of America, in which he established the Richter scale for measuring the energy of an earthquake.

Oberth and von Braun’s Verein fur Raumschiffahrt (Space Travel Society) had been dissolved a few months earlier, partly due to lack of funding and after countless failures. But in December of the same year, Wernher von Braun managed to launch two rockets for the army,

Rome. Immediately after the first neutron bombardments of uranium, Professor Orso Mario Corbino gave a speech at the Accademia dei Lincei, in the presence of the king and the press. Unwisely, while admitting prudence, he declared the discovery of new transuranic elements. It was then

Fermi’s group, on Via Panisperna, had the seemingly bizarre idea of immersing small silver cylinders under neutron radiation in the goldfish tank filled with water in the former nuns’ convent, slowing down the neutrons and thus making them more likely to be captured by atomic

Rome, Enrico Fermi’s working group, first splitting of the atom, it is the uranium atom

Hideki Yukawa predicts the existence of mesons and pions

Rome. The High Altitude Unit was established within the Guidonia-Montecelio Experimental Center, near Rome. In April of the same year, before the unit was actually established, Renato Donati set the altitude record with a modified Caproni 113 AQ (High Altitude) biplane, equipped with a 550

Charles William Beebe and Otis Barton reach a depth of 900 meters with their bathysphere, a new world record.

After a Nazi putsch in Vienna, Austria, Mussolini moved large Italian army troops to the Austrian border to prevent a possible German threat. This move intimidated the Germans (the Italian army at the time was more powerful and better armed than the German one).

The Parmigiano Reggiano Consortium is born

Philo Taylor Farnsworth gives the first public demonstration of his electronic television

China, Mao Zedong’s Communists begin the Long March to escape the Kuomintang Nationalists.

The famous bandits Bonnie & Clyde are killed by the police

Himmler takes control of the Gestapo, the German political police

Moscow. 17th Congress of the Communist Party, billed as the “Congress of the Victors,” and later renamed the “Congress of the Shot,” as within a few years, 1,098 of the 1,186 participants would be shot during Stalin’s purges.

Frederic Joliot and Irene Curie discover artificial radioactivity

Kolmogorov: Axiomization of Probability Theory

A Littlewood student, Stanley Skewes, estimated that only when counting the first few numbers no smaller than 10^10^10^34 can one witness the underestimation of the number of primes by Gaussian integral logarithm. This is an incredibly large number, probably the largest number ever considered in

Englishman John Tiltman manages to break the Japanese military code. The Japanese will soon change the code, which will also be solved in September 1934 by Oliver Strachey.

Nobel Prize in Physics to Erwin Schrödinger and Paul Dirac for their contributions to atomic theory

Hungarian physicist Leo Szilard, while crossing a street in London, suddenly realizes the possibility of a nuclear chain reaction.

Dutch physicist Ehrenfest, a close friend of Einstein, suffered from a very severe form of depression, which led him to shoot his youngest son, who had Down syndrome, and then take his own life.

Enrico Fermi bombarded uranium with neutrons to observe the high-energy alpha particles they emitted; in the experiment, he took care to shield the uranium with inert material to absorb the low-energy alpha particles. Had he not done so, he would likely have discovered nuclear fission

Flexner, the director of the Princeton Research Institute, hires Albert Einstein for a salary of $15,000 a year.

Goebbels becomes German Minister of Information

The Boeing 247 is Boeing’s first passenger aircraft (twin-engine monoplane)

The U.S. Army inaugurates a bombing range on the salty bottom of Muroc Dry Lake in California; it will become Edwards Air Force Base, named for Glen W. Edwards, who lost his life at Muroc in June 1948 while piloting a YB-49 Flying Wing, an

World’s Fair in Chicago: General Italo Balbo participates by flying across the Moon; the logistics are organized by Gene Aldrin, father of Edwin Eugene “Buzz” Aldrin, future member of the Apollo 11 crew and second man on the Moon.

Special Jubilee (anniversary of the death and resurrection of Christ) celebrated by Pius XI

Fritz Zwicky, at Mount Wilson, observing the Coma galaxy cluster, concludes that dark matter must exist to explain the high velocity of the galaxies themselves.

Richard Tolman of CalTech in Pasadena, California, suggests that regions of the universe beyond the reach of our telescopes are contracting rather than expanding, and contain matter at a stage of density and development quite different from that known to us.

Radio astronomy: Karl Jansky of Bell Labs records a mysterious background noise from deep space, which he calls “star noise.” A few years later, in 1937, Grote Reber builds the first radio telescope in Illinois and records a strong radio signature from the constellations Cygnus

California-based Standard Oil signs an agreement to develop crude oil fields in the newly formed Saudi Arabia under the Wahhabi family.

Guglielmo Marconi is appointed President of the Institute of the Italian Encyclopaedia. He will also contribute several entries.

Wiley Post completes solo round-the-world flight. American aviator Wiley Post returns to Floyd Bennet Field in New York, completing the world’s first solo round-the-world flight in 7 days, 18 hours, and 49 minutes. Post, recognizable by the eyepatch he wore, departed on July 15th, reaching

Ettore Majorana wrote a letter to Emilio Segre’, also a member of the Fermi or Ragazzi di Via Panisperna group. In the letter, made public by Segre’ only in 1988, shortly before his death, Majorana spoke sympathetically about the Jewish question in Germany, also stating

Bruno Rossi discovers that cosmic rays, entering the atmosphere, produce extensive showers of particles, sometimes exotic.