Martin Luther is made a doctor of theology (1512), and Max Planck discovers the formula for heated objects' radiation (1900). Born on this day: Miguel Ángel Asturias, Subrahmanyan Chandrasekhar and Philip Pullman. Died: Ernest Rutherford, Lu Xun and Jonathan Swift.
28 events, 58 births and 46 deaths on this date.
On this day in 1512, the German friar took his doctorate in theology at Wittenberg, a qualification that gave him the standing to teach scripture at the university. Within a decade he would challenge the Church over indulgences and spark the Protestant Reformation.
Lucas Cranach the Elder · Public domainPlanck found a formula that matched how an idealised heated object glows across every colour of light, fitting measurements that older theories could not explain. To derive it he assumed energy arrives in discrete packets, an idea that became the foundation of quantum physics.
The former Iraqi leader, toppled in 2003, now faced a court in Baghdad charged with crimes against humanity. Having ruled Iraq for over two decades, he was now answering to the justice system of the state he once led.
Iraqi News Agency · Public domain
Allied planes sent the Sinfra, a German cargo ship, to the bottom of the sea. Most of those killed were Italian prisoners of war being carried by the German vessel.
In 1579 James VI, then thirteen, was feted in Edinburgh with a festival marking his coming of age in government. The celebration showed how far he had moved beyond his regents and into his own rule, a path that later led him to the English throne.
Heidelberg began teaching with its first lecture, creating the oldest university in Germany. It was only the third university set up within the Holy Roman Empire, after Prague and Vienna.
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Guatemalan poet, novelist and diplomat whose El Señor Presidente, a portrait of life under a ruthless dictator, helped shape magical realism in Latin American writing. He won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1967.
Dominique Roger · CC BY-SA 3.0 igo
Subrahmanyan Chandrasekhar was an astrophysicist whose work on how stars age and die earned him a share of the 1983 Nobel Prize in Physics. He is remembered for the Chandrasekhar limit, which sets the maximum mass a white dwarf can reach before it collapses further.
AIP Emilio Segrè Visual Archives, Gift of Kameshwar Wali · Attribution
Philip Pullman is an English author remembered mainly for His Dark Materials, a fantasy trilogy that began with Northern Lights. That first book won the Carnegie Medal, and he was knighted in 2019 for services to literature.
Photographed by Adrian Hon , http://mssv.net/ · CC BY-SA 2.0
Rutherford showed that atoms keep their charge in a tiny central nucleus, and he was the first to split an atom artificially, in 1917. His work underpins much of modern nuclear physics.
George Grantham Bain Collection (Library of Congress) · Public domain
Lu Xun was a Chinese writer whose sharp, satirical essays and stories helped shape modern Chinese literature. His 1918 story Diary of a Madman is often cited as the first vernacular Chinese short story, written in plain spoken language rather than classical style.
Unknown author Unknown author · Public domain
Anglo-Irish satirist and cleric, remembered for Gulliver's Travels and the island of Lilliput. He wrote much of his work under pseudonyms, and his deadpan irony gave us the word Swiftian.
Charles Jervas · Public domain
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