1916 in science

The year 1916 in science and technology involved some significant events, listed below.

Chemistry

* Gilbert N. Lewis and Irving Langmuir formulate an electron shell model of chemical bonding
* Sydney Chapman and David Enskog systematically develop a kinetic theory of gases
* Jan Czochralski invents a method for growing single crystals of metals.

Physics

* Albert Einstein shows that the field equations of general relativity admit wavelike solutions
* Karl Schwarzschild solves the Einstein vacuum field equations for uncharged spherically-symmetric non-rotating systems,

Births

* January 10 - Sune K. Bergström (d. 2004), Swedish biochemist, winner of the 1982 Nobel Prize for Medicine.
* March 4 - Hans Eysenck (d. 1997), psychologist.
* April 30 - Claude E. Shannon (d. 2001), mathematician.
* June 8 - Francis Crick (d. 2004), American Nobelaureate in Physiology for discovering the double helix structure for DNA.
* June 11 - Aleksandr Mikhailovich Prokhorov (d. 2002), physicist.
* December 15 - Maurice Wilkins (d. 2004), Nobelaureate in Physiology for discovering the double helix structure for DNA using X-ray diffraction.

Deaths

* February 12 - Richard Dedekind (b. 1831), mathematician.
* February 19 - Ernst Mach (b. 1838), physicist.
* May 11 - Karl Schwarzschild (b. 1873), astronomer and physicist.
* July 23 - Sir William Ramsay (b. 1852), chemist and Nobel prize winner.
* November 13 - Percival Lowell (b. 1855), astronomer.
* November 24 - Hiram Maxim (b. 1840), inventor of the machine gun.