1946 in science

Astronomy

• January 10 – The United States Army Signal Corps' Project Diana bounces radar waves off the Moon.
• Reginald Aldworth Daly of Harvard University first proposes a giant impact hypothesis to account for formation of the moon.

  Biology

• November 10 – Peter Scott opens the Slimbridge Wetland Reserve in England.
• Karl von Frisch publishes "Die Tänze der Bienen".
• Edmund Jaeger discovers and later documents, in The Condor, a state of extended torpor, approaching hibernation, in a bird, the common poorwill.

  Cartography

• The Chamberlin trimetric projection is developed in 1946 by Wellman Chamberlin for the National Geographic Society.

  Computer science

• February 14-15 – ENIAC, the first non-classified all-electronic Turing complete computer, built under the direction of J. Presper Eckert and John Mauchly, is announced and dedicated at the University of Pennsylvania's Moore School of Electrical Engineering. It is programmable by plugboard and uses conditional branching.
• December 11 – Frederick Williams receives a patent for a random-access memory device.

  Earth sciences

• Arthur Holmes estimates the age of the Earth, using uranium–lead dating.

  Medicine

• July 14 – Dr. Benjamin Spock's The Common Sense Book of Baby and Child Care is first published in New York; it becomes one of the biggest best-sellers of all time.
• Harold Gillies begins to perform sex reassignment surgery on Michael Dillon, including the first phalloplasty for a trans man.
• Chance Brothers of Smethwick, England, produce the first all-glass syringe with interchangeable barrel and plunger, allowing easy mass-sterilisation of components.
• Alfred Gilman, with Frederick S. Philips, first publish the results of trials of anti-cancer chemotherapy, using mechlorethamine, carried out with Louis S. Goodman.

  Physics

• January 1 – Atomic Energy Research Establishment established at Harwell, Oxfordshire under John Cockcroft.
• May 21 – Manhattan Project physicist Louis Slotin accidentally triggers a fission reaction at the Los Alamos National Laboratory and gives himself a lethal dose of hard radiation, making him the second victim of a criticality accident in history.
• The BBGKY hierarchy of equations for s-particle distribution functions is applied to the derivation of kinetic equations by Nikolay Bogolyubov in a paper received in July 1945 and published in 1946 in Russian and in English. The related kinetic transport theory is considered by John Gamble Kirkwood in a paper received in October 1945 and published in March 1946. The first paper by Max Born and Herbert S. Green considering a general kinetic theory of liquids is received in February 1946 and published on 31 December 1946.

  Awards

• Nobel Prizes
• * Physics – Percy Williams Bridgman
• * Chemistry – James B. Sumner, John Howard Northrop, Wendell Meredith Stanley
• * Medicine – Hermann Joseph Muller

  Births

• February 26 – Ahmed Zewail, Egyptian-born "father of femtochemistry", recipient of the Nobel Prize in Chemistry
• May 11 – Robert Jarvik, American co-inventor of the Jarvik-7 artificial heart
• June 13 – Paul L. Modrich, American biochemist, recipient of the Nobel Prize in Chemistry
• June 24 – Ellison Onizuka, American astronaut
• July 2 – Richard Axel, American physiologist, recipient of the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine
• August 2 – Nigel Hitchin, English mathematician
• August 5 – Shirley Ann Jackson, African American physicist
• August 11 – Marilyn vos Savant, American polymath
• September 7 – Francisco Varela, Chilean-born biologist and philosopher
• September 8 – Aziz Sancar, Turkish biochemist, recipient of the Nobel Prize in Chemistry
• September 28 – Morinobu Endo, Japanese chemist
• October 14 – Kay Redfield Jamison, American clinical psychologist
• October 17 – Carol Dweck, American social psychologist
• December 31 – Roy Porter, English medical historian
• Faiza Al-Kharafi, Kuwaiti electrochemist

  Deaths

• March 8 – Frederick W. Lanchester, English automotive engineer.
• March 23 – Gilbert N. Lewis, American chemist; first to isolate deuterium.
• March 26 – Gerhard Heilman, Danish paleo-ornithologist.
• May 2 – Simon Flexner, American pathologist and bacteriologist.
• June 14 – John Logie Baird, Scottish-born inventor.
• August 13 – H. G. Wells, English novelist and scientific populariser.
• September 16 – James Jeans, English mathematician and scientist.
• October 2 – Ignacy Mościcki, chemist and President of Poland.
• October 4 – Barney Oldfield, American automobile racer.
• December 2 – Hilda Lyon, English aeronautical engineer.
• Israel Aharoni, Russian-born Jewish zoologist.