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From today's featured article
Blair Peach
Blair Peach died on 24 April 1979 after an anti-racism demonstration in Southall, London, England. Peach, a New Zealand teacher and activist born in 1946, had taken part in an Anti-Nazi League demonstration against a National Front election meeting in Southall Town Hall. An investigation by Commander John Cass of the Metropolitan Police Service concluded that Peach had been fatally hit on the head by an officer of the service's Special Patrol Group, and that other officers had obstructed the investigation. Excerpts from a leaked copy of the report were published in early 1980. In 1988 the Metropolitan Police paid £75,000 compensation to Peach's family. The full report was not released to the public until 2009, after a newspaper vendor died from being struck from behind by a member of the Territorial Support Group, the Special Patrol Group's successor organisation. An award in Peach's honour was set up by the National Union of Teachers, and a school in Southall is named after him. (Full article...)
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On this day
April 24: Armenian Genocide Remembrance Day (1915); Administrative Professionals Day in various countries (2024)
Hubble Space Telescope
- 1837 – A fire broke out in Surat, India, which went on to destroy about 75% of the city.
- 1914 – The Franck–Hertz experiment, the first electrical measurement to clearly demonstrate quantum mechanics, was presented to the German Physical Society.
- 1916 – Irish republicans led by Patrick Pearse began the Easter Rising against British rule in Ireland, and proclaimed the Irish Republic an independent state.
- 1990 – The Hubble Space Telescope (pictured) was launched aboard STS-31 by Space Shuttle Discovery.
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Today's featured picture
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Luis Walter Alvarez (1911–1988) was an American experimental physicist who was awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1968 for his discovery of resonance states in particle physics using the hydrogen bubble chamber. After receiving his PhD from the University of Chicago in 1936, Alvarez went to work for Ernest Lawrence at the Radiation Laboratory at the University of California, Berkeley. He joined MIT Radiation Laboratory in 1940, where he contributed to a number of World War II radar projects and worked as a test pilot, before joining J. Robert Oppenheimer on the Manhattan Project in 1943. He moved back to Berkeley as a full professor after the war, going on to use his knowledge in work on improving particle accelerators. This 1969 photograph shows Alvarez with a magnetic monopole detector at Berkeley. Photograph credit: Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory / Department of Energy
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