Australia. Thirty-one Aboriginal people were shot and killed in Alice Springs.

Von Neumann introduces the extended form (graphs) of Game Theory

Soviet Union: First Five-Year Plan

Hermann Oberth is a consultant in Germany for a science fiction film called The Girl in the Moon; in the film, among other things, the countdown is invented, and a small rocket is built; one of the boys (18 years old) who participates in this experience and is fascinated by it is Werner von Braun.

C.J. Davisson and L.H. Germer demonstrate the close relationship between wavenumber and momentum (i.e. between frequency and energy) with experiments on the deflection of electron beams incident on crystal lattices of various nature.

Jordan and Pauli provide a mathematical scheme to describe the free motion of photons according to a quantized version of Maxwell’s theory of electromagnetism.

At the Fifth Physicists’ Conference in Solvay, a debate takes place between Werner Heisenberg and Erwin Schrödinger on one side and Albert Einstein on the other. That evening, in Brussels, the incredible quantum physicists’ dinner is held, a gala dinner hosted by the Belgian royals. Among those attending are Albert Einstein, Niels Bohr, Marie Curie, Arthur Compton, William Bragg, Irving Langmuir, and others.

Fifth Solvay Physicists Conference: The title “Electrons & Photons” shows how electrons and photons are now treated on the same level

Johnny von Neumann, having completed his Rockefeller Foundation scholarship, obtained a job at the University of Berlin. The job did not provide him with a direct salary, but only the opportunity to give paid lectures and conferences. But it did provide him access to Berlin’s intellectual life. He then moved (this time on a salary) to Hamburg in 1929. He published a masterpiece of mathematical physics: “Mathematical Foundations of Quantum Mechanics” in 1932.

Nobel Prize in Physics to Arthur Compton

Lev Trotsky (Лев Троцкий), pseudonym of Lev Davidovič Bronštejn (Лев Давидович Бронштейн) is expelled from the Politburo

Great Britain. Half a million workers go on general strike. The Conservative government sends in the army. A period of industrial hardship begins that will last half a century in Britain.

Robert Goddard launches the first liquid-fueled rocket

Bishkek, the capital of Kyrgyzstan, is renamed Frunze by Stalin, a name it retains until 1991, when it reverts to Bishkek. Mikhail Frunze, an early Bolshevik revolutionary and a contender for power after Lenin’s death in 1924, died mysteriously in 1924 during a stomach operation “ordered” by the Politburo. This followed another “strange” car accident in which Frunze’s driver died. After Frunze’s death, the doctors who participated in the operation also mysteriously die, and the investigation doesn’t get far. A writer attempts to publish his novel, “The Story of the Moon,” in which he reconstructs the events, but he too is killed.

Jordan, Heisemberg, Dirac, and Pauli develop Quantum Electrodynamics (QED)

Paul Dirac, based on the Pauli Exclusion Principle, proposed that the vacuum itself is saturated with particles occupying all possible negative-energy states; in practice, the vacuum is a huge inert atom that prevents (excludes) electrons from falling into increasingly negative-energy states (a solution possible with theoretical formulas and which had until then caused physicists no small headaches); the absence of a particle in a negative-energy state (for example, if it is given enough energy to emerge from the sea of negative energy) corresponds to the presence of positive energy E=mc2 where m is a positron (the electron’s antimatter), which would actually be discovered 6 years later, in 1932.

Erwin Schrodinger develops the formula that will take his name

English mathematician Harold Jeffreys confirms the hypothesis of Irish geologist R.D. Oldham, who years earlier had observed that shock waves from an earthquake in Guatemala had penetrated the planet to a certain depth, then bounced back to the surface. Jeffreys confirms that the measurements are consistent with the existence of a solid Earth core.

Klein demonstrates that the fifth dimension (fourth spatial dimension) must be 10-35 m, or the Planck length. In 1919, Kaluza, introducing a fifth dimension, described light as a disturbance in this fifth dimension. Kaluza thus found the first clue to transforming wood into marble. The marbling of physics, as Einstein intended it, who saw space-time as “marble”: clean, beautiful, elegant, while matter is “wood,” or a hideous, confusing collection of random shapes (referring to the plethora of particles and subparticles that form crystals, rocks, etc.).

Schrodinger introduces the equation that bears his name, perhaps the most important in all of mathematical physics.

At Villa Hernig, in the mountains, Schrödinger develops quantum wave mechanics. At the villa, in the Swiss Alps, Schrödinger is not with his wife, but with one of his many lovers.

Robert J. Oppenheimer, suffering from recurring bouts of depression and schizophrenia, commits an incredible act: he poisons an apple and leaves it on his tutor Patrick Blackett’s desk at the Cavendish Labs in Cambridge, England. The incident is hushed up by the intervention of Robert’s father, Julius, who puts pressure on the University. Robert, however, is transferred and undergoes a period of diagnosis and treatment.

Erwin Schroedinger secures a professorship at the University of Zurich at the age of 37.

In 1925, after the crash of one of their airplanes in 1921 that killed one of the brothers, Giocondo, the Jacuzzi brothers abandoned the aeronautical industry. Rachele Jacuzzi turned to the market for agricultural submersible pumps.

George Uhlenbeck and Samuel Goudsmit conclude that the electron must possess the quantum mechanical property of spin with two possible states

Wolfgang Pauli: Exclusion Principle