Iguacu National Park, the second in Brazil, is inaugurated in Brazil

J. Robert Oppenheimer and Hartland Snyder study the case of the collapse of a star into a black hole in the case of fully symmetric gravitational collapse, using Schwarzschild geometry.

Horace Babcock, measuring the rotation rate of the Andromeda Galaxy, obtained the unexpected result that the rotation of the outer parts of the disk was much faster than expected from Newton’s laws of universal gravitation. These results, in the 1970s and 1980s, were generalized to all galaxies of this type. Furthermore, the discrepancy increased from the center of the galaxy to the periphery. This evidence for the presence of dark matter.

Warner Bros. creates Bugs Bunny

In Hungary, the Arrow Cross (fascist movement) is the most popular force (250,000 members out of 7 million inhabitants) but fails to take power, which is maintained by a right-wing government.

The Romanian Iron Guard (Legion of the Archangel Michael) is the third largest fascist movement in Europe; but political power is maintained by a semi-authoritarian right-wing government.

Pius XII (Eugenio Pacelli) is Pope

Acupuncture with stainless steel needles (which do not cause diseases due to rust) has been documented since 1939. Among the policies Mao would push in China was acupuncture, pushed by the regime to please poor Chinese communities who could not afford expensive medicines. The wealthy, on the other hand, took antibiotics, vaccines, and everything else we know. Mao himself never personally used acupuncture. In China at the beginning of the 21st century, acupuncture was used by the poorest segments of the population. In the West, curiously, only by the wealthiest.

Linus Pauling publishes “The Nature of Chemical Bond and Structure of Protein”

The Germans adopt new rotors for their Enigma machines. The British will be able to decrypt them in January 1940.

During December 1938, sensational events in German physics demonstrated that Fermi had completely misinterpreted his neutron experiments, the very ones for which he had just won the Nobel Prize. He would never recover from the embarrassment. Otto Hahn and Lise Meitner in Berlin (Lise was the second woman to earn a PhD in physics from Berlin) correctly interpreted the phenomenon as the splitting of the uranium atom, which, according to Lise Meitner, is held together by a mechanism similar to the surface tension of a drop of water, and which can explode if subjected to external forces (neutron collisions). The results were published on January 6, 1939. For the second time in less than five years, a small and scattered scientific group, hidden in a quiet corner of a highly oppressive and totalitarian society, had conducted and completed cutting-edge research with historic consequences for the entire 20th century. The bad news for Fermi, about the discovery in Germany, humiliated him: not only could he have discovered fission five years earlier, but he had also been awarded the Nobel Prize for the wrong reason. As the years passed, he would laugh it off. The subsequent idea, that of the chain reaction, had already been conceived by Leo Szilard, a Hungarian, who had also patented it in 1933 in England and transferred the rights to the British Admiralty, fearing it would fall into Nazi hands. The Admiralty, not knowing what to do with it, shelved the matter and forgot about it. Szilard then went to the United States, where he collaborated with Fermi on the Manhattan Project, along with other Hungarian escapees: in addition to Szilard, von Neumann, Teller, Wigner, von Karman, Halmos, Polya, and Erdos. They were all particularly gifted in physics, so much so that Fermi once joked: “Of course extraterrestrials are among us, they just call themselves ‘Hungarians.’”

The Fermi family, after spending a few days on holiday in Copenhagen, also visiting the Bohr family, embarked on the Franconia in Southampton, bound for the United States of America.

Nobel Prize in Physics awarded to Fermi. From Stockholm, Fermi, for racial reasons, moved directly to the USA. The Via Panisperna group ended. Fermi received the prestigious prize alone: he did not have to share it with anyone. The only other recipient of the award that year was the American writer Pearl Buck. Fermi shook hands with the King of Sweden, instead of giving the fascist salute. Controversy erupted in the Italian newspapers: Fascism despised the handshake, finding it effeminate. The Fermi family then embarked for the English Channel and departed from Southampton on December 24, 1938, by ship for New York. The reason for the Nobel Prize was “for his demonstrations of the existence of new radioactive elements produced by neutron irradiation, and for his related discovery of nuclear reactions brought about by slow neutrons.” It was later understood a few months later that he had not actually discovered new elements, but had split the atom, thanks to slow neutrons.

The Fermi family: Enrico, Laura, Nella, Giulio board the train at Rome station that will take them to Sweden to collect the Nobel Prize: they will not return to Italy until after the end of the war.

Wernher von Braun, now too important a figure in Germany, becomes a member of the National Socialist Party

Milton Sirotta, the 9-year-old nephew of Edward Kasner, a professor at Barnard College of Columbia University in New York, invented the name Googol (10^100) and then the name Googolplex (10^Googol). A Googolplex is such a large number that if you tried to write it out in “Arial 10,” it wouldn’t fit in the visible universe, which is “only” 10^27m. (Incidentally, writing it out in a different font wouldn’t make much difference…)

Wallace Hume Carothers of Du Pont commercializes nylon. Its first use is in toothbrush bristles. Then, in 1939, it becomes women’s stockings. It’s “artificial silk.” Nylon stockings are a huge commercial success. By 1940, 64 million pairs of nylon stockings have been produced and sold.

Nazi scientist Hans Spemann proposed replacing the nucleus of an egg cell: his ideas led to the first cloning experiments

A specimen of coelacanth (Latimeria chalumnae, a crossopterygian fish thought to have become extinct 100 million years ago) was caught off the coast of South Africa.

SS chief Henrich Himmler sent an expedition to Tibet to search for traces of a race of superhumans who lived underground and possessed an occult power called “vril.” Vril was actually the invention of an English science fiction writer who had published a novel in 1870, “Vril: The Power of the Coming Race,” but by then, its origins forgotten, it had become an urban legend. Himmler believed that the Aryans were descendants of this superhuman population, although other Nazis maintained that they descended from Thule Land, a sort of Atlantis that existed centuries earlier between Greenland and Iceland.

Hans Bethe is the first to describe a separate nuclear fusion cycle for carbon, nitrogen, and oxygen, cycles that provide energy to massive stars during their short lives.

In the USA, W. Pollard and H. Roselund design a programmable painting mechanism for the DeVilbiso company

Swiss-born German Walter Schottky, at Siemens, theoretically explains the metal-semiconductor junction

California. Riding the wave of investment in military technology, Dave Packard and Bill Hewlett tinkered in their Palo Alto garage until they produced their first device: an audio frequency generator. HP would become a 20th-century icon.

Konrad Zuse, a German engineer, built the Z1 computer in his parents’ living room. It read instructions from a punched card and was mechanical (not electrical or electronic). Helmut Schreyer advised him to use vacuum tubes, but they were too expensive, so they built the Z2 and then the Z3 in 1941, which would become the first functioning general-purpose programmable digital computer.

Modena publisher Fortunato Formiggini, known as Furmajun from Modena, threw himself from the Ghirlandina Tower to protest racial measures. On the morning of November 29, 1938, he threw himself from the Ghirlandina, the cathedral’s tower, falling onto a narrow patch of pavement that he himself, in one of his last letters, had ironically asked to be called, in his memory, al tvajol ed Furmajin, the Formaggino napkin, in the Modenese dialect: a plaque bearing this name today commemorates him.

The racial laws in Germany and then throughout Europe led to a steady flow of Jewish emigrants to the United States, England, and Sweden. Approximately 23,500 of these would ultimately remain in their adoptive country. About one hundred of these were highly regarded physicists. Among them: Albert Einstein, Enrico Fermi, Gregory Breit, Edward Teller, Eugene Wigner, Hans Bethe, James Franck, Franz Hess, Otto Stern, and Felix Bloch.

Kristallnacht in Germany: Windows of hundreds of Jewish shops are smashed.

Halloween: Orson Welles broadcasts his version of H.G. Wells’s “War of the Worlds” on CBS radio. The music is interrupted to announce that Princeton astronomers have seen a flash on Mars. Then, a few minutes later, news breaks of a meteorite in New Jersey. Reports from on-site reporters also report seeing Martians emerge from the meteorite and begin massacring the population with death rays.

Mario Pezzi entered aeronautical history. Assigned to the 1st Experimental Center, on May 7, 1937, he set the altitude record by reaching 15,655 meters aboard a Ca.161. For this occasion, Pezzi wore a special pressurized and electrically heated spacesuit and a watertight helmet, similar to those worn by modern astronauts. However, the record was immediately broken by the Englishman Adams, forcing Lieutenant Colonel Pezzi to attempt the feat again on October 22, 1938, with the same Caproni Ca.161 modified as the “special Ca.161 bis,” equipped with a Piaggio engine with a dual compressor and a watertight cabin, a forerunner of modern pressurized cabins, reaching an altitude of 17,083 meters: an exceptional record that remains unbeaten today for piston-engine aircraft. For accomplishing this historic feat, Pezzi was awarded the Gold Medal for Aeronautical Valor and promoted to the rank of Colonel. Transferred to the East African Air Force Command, he was appointed Chief of Staff in 1941. In December 1943, he assumed command of the Air Unit, which operated until February 1945. In September 1948, he was appointed Director General of Military Personnel of the Air Force, Chief of Staff to the Minister of Defense in 1950, and finally, in 1955, he was appointed Secretary General of the Air Force, his final posting until his retirement. He died in Rome on August 26, 1968.

Italy passes the Manifesto of Race: essentially anti-Semitic laws.

The members of the SS are 238,159 and continue to grow, during the war years they reach one million

Vorkuta, Soviet Union (Siberia, just west of the gigantic mouth of the Ob River). Trotskyists held in the gulag are gathered for a march through the snow. Suddenly, from an invisible point in the blinding white blanket, heavy machine gun fire opens on the advancing black column of men. Death arrives cloaked in sun and snow. Those who survive are finished off with Colt rifles. 1,053 Trotskyists are killed. A few days later, another 760 people are killed in the same place, in the same manner. These are the Kasketin shootings, named after the commander who ordered them. Another 200 are killed at the brickyard station, forced into the building naked and shot in the back. Their bodies are burned in the tundra. A few weeks earlier, another 250 Trotskyists are shot on the railway in Rudnik. Among them was Frank Dickler, a Jew from Brasilia, who had been fascinated by Soviet propaganda in New York and had boarded a ship. Marching with him, Dickler recognized Andreycin, an American communist originally from Yugoslavia who had lectured at Madison Square Garden. Andreycin saw Dicker and shouted: “Frank! Just listen, don’t say a word! This is the end. We’re going to be murdered in cold blood! Frank! Listen! If you ever get out, tell the world who they are: a bunch of cutthroats! Assassins! Bandits!” Others, hearing the screams, began to cry: many evidently understood English. Arriving in a ravine, they were machine-gunned by soldiers stationed there. Dickler miraculously escaped, fled, and even returned to Brasilia, where forty years later he related the story to Solzhenitsyn.

A hurricane in the North Atlantic triggers a tidal wave that kills 600 people on the New England coast.

Lev Landau, the USSR’s greatest theoretical physicist, was arrested and imprisoned for anti-Soviet activities during the Great Purge. He was released only thanks to the intervention of international figures such as Pyotr Kapitsa and Niels Bohr.

The beautiful physics student Gilda Senatore goes to the University of Naples like every day to attend class, and after class, she stays in the classroom, as she often does, to study. Suddenly, Professor Ettore Majorana calls her: “Miss, Miss Senator!” She turns and sees the notoriously taciturn professor standing at the door. A little surprised, she doesn’t move, and he starts to leave. Something makes Gilda stand up and run after him: “What’s the matter, Professor?” Ettore stops and looks at her intently. Gilda can’t explain why, but it was clear something was wrong. “Here, Miss, would you please hold these papers for me? We’ll talk about it later.” This is the last person Ettore Majorana wanted to see. Before disappearing.

Oskar Klein discovered what would become known as Yang-Mills fields (rediscovered in 1954 and used from 1973 onwards to construct the Standard Model). Klein presented his work in Warsaw, titled “New Physical Theories.” Then, with the chaos of World War II and the rise of quantum physics, the Kaluza-Klein theory was forgotten.

Seaborg discovered cobalt-60, a radiation source later widely used in medicine to treat tumors. A year earlier, brothers John (a doctor of medicine) and Ernest (a physicist) Lawrence had decided to treat their mother, who was suffering from uterine cancer, with X-rays in Ernest Lawrence’s laboratory. The tumor disappeared. Their mother, then 67, lived to 83. Radiotherapy and cobalt therapy were born.

While Alan Turing was finishing his doctoral thesis in England, John von Neumann from the United States offered him the position of assistant. Turing was tempted by the offer, but with war likely looming, he preferred to offer his services to Great Britain. He would soon participate in the decryption of ENIGMA.

Vienna. Abraham Wald is a young Austrian statistician. He comes from an Orthodox Jewish family. With the Anschluss (annexation of Austria by Nazi Germany), his world collapses. That same day, March 11th, his academic tutor and benefactor, Karl Schlesinger, commits suicide. Abraham Wald will clandestinely cross the border into Romania and leave for America. His parents, grandparents, and five brothers and sisters will all remain in Austria, and all but one, his brother Hermann, will lose their lives in the Holocaust. In the United States, he begins his career in Colorado Springs, but is quickly noticed by those in high places, and after a few months (fall 1938) he receives a research contract at Columbia University in New York. He will help the Air Force (USAF) use conditional probability and Bayes’ Theorem to calculate where to strengthen airplanes (the simple answer is near the engines). The work is not simple because it must necessarily start from a good model (a priori probability), which is developed by interviewing expert aviators and engineers and also by conducting tests. This technique will also be used for other aircraft, such as the B-52. Its algorithm will not be published until the 1980s.

Joachim Von Ribbentrop becomes German Foreign Minister

Hitler personally leads the Wehrmacht

Du Pont produces Teflon

Hungarian Laszlo Biró, after studying medicine, practicing hypnosis, racing, and journalism, along with his brother György, invented the ballpoint pen as we know it today. The invention actually dates back to 1888, when John L. Loud invented it, but he never commercialized it (it also leaked a lot of ink). The Biró patent was registered in Hungary in 1938 and in Argentina, where they fled to escape Nazism, in 1943.

The comic book character “Superman” is created

The Basque city of Guernica is bombed by German aircraft.

Ray Ban glasses are created for US pilots

Palestine: first proposal for territorial partition between the Palestinian and Israeli peoples. Palestine is still under British protectorate. This is the first mention of the so-called “two-state solution.” It was adopted by United Nations Resolution 181 in 1947 and has since been consistently accepted by American diplomacy, but alternating and never fully accepted by the Palestinians and Israelis. In 1937, the Palestinians were offered 70% of Palestine, but the solution was rejected. In 1947, the Palestinians were offered 45% of the land, and the Israeli portion was mostly desert. However, here too, the solution was rejected by the Palestinians and Arab countries, and war was chosen, which was ultimately won by the Israelis. Many years later, with the mediation of American President Bill Clinton, the Palestinians were offered 22%, again under the “two-state solution”, and the Intifada was chosen: the holy war against the infidels.

Dobzhansky publishes “Genetics and the Origin of Species,” the first truly scientific discussion of Darwinian natural selection in rigorous terms of the behavior of genes in natural populations. Essentially, it is the modern synthesis of genetics and evolutionism.

Through the observation of cosmic rays, muons, the first particles of the second generation, were discovered, opening up new and unexpected horizons in the standard model, so much so that Isaac Rabi exclaimed: “Who ordered that?”

Nobel Prize for Physics to Clinton Davisson and George Thomson.

The Japanese arrive in Nanking and massacre more than 100,000 civilians in the next 12 months.

Spain. In the Battle of Brunete, the famous photographer Gerda Taro (real name Gerda Phorylle), companion of Robert Capa (real name André Friedmann), dies behind the Republican lines. According to several accounts, a Republican tank, while reversing, unknowingly collides violently with the car carrying Gerda. She dies the next day in hospital from her wounds. Journalist Robin Stummer, citing Willy Brandt (the future German Chancellor and Gerda’s friend during the Spanish Civil War), claims that Gerda fell victim to Stalin’s purges targeting those who did not align with Soviet positions.

Guglielmo Marconi dies. His wife Cristina reports that, shortly before his death, he wrote to Mussolini, concerned about his overly intimate relationship with Hitler. He courageously warned Mussolini never to join Hitler in a war against England. Mussolini replied: “You speak like that because your mother was English.” Marconi commented to his wife: “Knowing Mussolini, I think he will be adamant. I am certain that entering the war against England will be a terrible tragedy for Italy and the House of Savoy.” During his funeral, all radio stations around the world interrupted broadcasts for two minutes, returning the airwaves to total silence, as it had been before Guglielmo Marconi’s invention.

Moscow. Paolo Robotti, whose wife was Palmiro Togliatti’s sister, is arrested by the KGB. He tells his wife, “Don’t tell Ercoli anything.” (Ercole Ercoli was Palmiro Togliatti’s conventional name in the Soviet Union; Ercoli was the deputy secretary of the Comintern, the Third Communist International.)

Claude Shannon takes a break from MIT and heads to Manhattan’s Bell Labs (near Greenwich Village). Bell Labs is a paradise for inventors: theory and practice intersect in chance encounters in the long corridors and cafeterias. The cross-fertilization of different disciplines and skills will indeed be the perfect recipe for the Third Industrial Revolution (and for innovation in general).

USSR. Stalin’s purges hit the Red Army’s top ranks: three of the five high marshals, 98 of the 100 members of the Supreme Military Council, 48,000 middle- and high-ranking officers, 13 of the 15 corps commanders, and eight of the nine admirals were executed. Never before had a country suffered such heavy losses in peacetime.

The influx of prisoners into the GULag system increased from 800,000 to over 2,000,000 people per year. This period would be remembered as “The Great Stalinist Terror.” GULag stands for Glavnoe Upravlenie Lagerej, or Central Camp Administration.

During the Stalinist Terror, Mikhail Gorbachev’s grandfather was arrested. His future wife Raisa’s grandfather was also arrested and executed during the same months. Mikhail’s grandfather was more “lucky”: the same NKVD cell that arrested him was purged, and the commander arrested, resulting in his release.

Paul Dirac argues that when one encounters large, dimensionless numbers of very high value in physics, such as 10^40 or 10^80, it is very unlikely that they are not connected to each other. He maintains that it is likely that there is a mathematical law of nature, not yet discovered, that binds them. This is the so-called Dirac Large Number Hypothesis. In particular, it refers to the age of the Universe, t, the speed of light, c, the mass of the electron, me, the mass of the proton, mp, and Newton’s universal gravitational constant, G. According to Dirac, we have: ct/(e^2/me*c^2) = 10^40 = e^2/(G*me*mp) = SQR(c^3*t/(G*mp) = k*t

Radio astronomy: Grote Reber builds the first radio telescope in Illinois and records a strong radio signature from the constellations Cygnus and Cassiopeia. This is the dawn of radio astronomy. In 1933, Karl Jansky of Bell Labs recorded a mysterious background noise from deep space, which he calls “star noise.” And astronomy also turns to the study of violent and frightening events, such as quasars and black holes, including the one at the center of our galaxy, in the constellation Cygnus. Then, in 1945, Frances Elisabeth Alexander discovers radio signals from the Sun, and in 1967, Jocelyne Bell-Burnell records periodic radio pulses (nicknamed LGM Little Green Men) emanating from stars later called pulsars.