Are You Sure? (September 21)

GNOMON CHRONICLES

Cryogenics Laboratory in Leiden, 1919. Left to right: Paul Ehrenfest, Hendrik Lorentz, Niels Bohr, and Heike Kamerlingh Onnes (discoverer of superconductivity).

Are You Sure ... (September 21, 2020)

• ... that physicist and chemist Heike Kamerlingh Onnes was awarded the 1913 Nobel Prize in Physics for "his investigations on the properties of matter at low temperatures which led, inter alia, to the production of liquid helium"?

• ... that in 1660, Vincenzo Viviani and Giovanni Alfonso Borelli conducted an experiment to determine the speed of sound. Timing the difference between the seeing the flash and hearing the sound of a cannon shot at a distance, they calculated a value of 350 meters per second (m/s), considerably better than the previous value of 478 m/s obtained by Pierre Gassendi?

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