| 1813 |
Upon his death, Montreal fur trader, merchant, and civic leader James
McGill bequeathes his 46-acre estate, Burnside Place, to the Royal
Institution for the Advancement of Learning to found "an English college on
a liberal scale" McGill College.
|
| 1821 |
Royal Charter granted to the University as McGill College.
|
| 1829 |
First classes start at McGill in the Faculty of Medicine.
|
| 1843 |
First classes start in the Faculty of Arts.
|
| 1854 |
Department of Natural Philosophy and Mathematics established in Faculty of
Arts.
|
| 1864 |
Honours in Mathematics and Natural Philosophy program established.
|
| 1891 |
Department of Physics established in split of Department of Natural
Philosophy and Mathematics. Wealthy philanthropist Sir William Macdonald
provides funding for a Physics Building, and for the creation of the
Macdonald Chair in Physics. John Cox named the first Macdonald Professor
of Physics.
|
| 1893 |
Opening of the Macdonald Physics Building, and creation of a second
Macdonald Chair in Physics. Establishment of the M.Sc. program in physics.
|
| 1898 |
Ernest Rutherford arrives in the Department of Physics as Macdonald
Professor of Physics. During his time at McGill, from 1898 to 1907,
Rutherford establishes a McGill tradition for excellent research in
Physics.
|
| 1908 |
Nobel Prize for Chemistry to Ernest Rutherford for research on
radioactivity carried out at McGill.
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| 1911 |
First Ph.D. granted in physics to Robert Boyle.
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| 1928 |
An important milestone was passed when Laura Rowles (née Chalk) was the first
woman to obtain a Ph.D. in physics from McGill University. Dr. Rowles died
in 1996.
|
| 1946 |
Construction of the Radiation Laboratory with the McGill 100 MeV cyclotron,
the second largest in the world at the time and Canada's first.
Theoretical physics starts with P. R. Wallace in the Department of
Mathematics.
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| 1949 |
McGill Cyclotron is fully commissioned and accelerates protons up to 100
MeV energy.
|
| 1950 |
The Eaton Electronics Research Laboratory, named for benefactor Lady Eaton,
opens adjacent to the Radiation Laboratory.
|
| 1955 |
Creation of the Rutherford Chair in Physics.
|
| 1961 |
A new form of radioactivity - delayed proton emission - is discovered by
Professor R. E. Bell and his student R. Barton, at the Radiation
Laboratory.
|
| 1963 |
Theoretical Physics transferred from the Department of Mathematics to the
Department of Physics.
|
| 1964 |
The Radiation Laboratory is renamed the J.S. Foster Radiation Laboratory in
honour of J.S. Foster, Department Chair from 1952 to 1955.
|
| 1968 |
The Radar Weather Observatory is established at the Macdonald Campus in
Ste. Anne.
|
| 1971 |
Formation of the Canadian Institute for Particle Physics with, as first
chairman, B. Margolis of the McGill Department of Physics.
|
| 1977 |
The Ernest Rutherford Physics Building opens adjacent to the Foster
Radiation Laboratory.
|
| 1982 |
Successful fabrication of amorphous metal strips.
|
| 1983 |
The McPherson Lecture Series is established to honour Anna McPherson, the
department's first woman professor (1940-1970), and a generous benefactor.
|
| 1987 |
Discovery of mixing in neutral mesons by members of the ARGUS experimental
collaboration.
|
| 1989 |
Creation of the McGill Centre for the Physics of Materials.
|
| 1994 |
First experimental evidence for the mass of the top quark announced by
members of the CDF collaboration.
|
| 2006 |
McGill astrophysics group discovers the fastest spinning pulsar known.
|
| 2009 |
McGill Physics alumnus Willard S. Boyle (BSc'47, MSc'48, PhD'50) shares
the Nobel Prize in Physics, for his developing of an imaging semiconductor
circuit, the CCD.
|
| 2012 |
As members of the ATLAS Collaboration using the Large Hadron Collider (LHC)
at CERN, McGill experimental particle physicists participate in the discovery
of a new particle consistent with the long-sought Higgs boson.
|