1964 in science

The year 1964 in science and technology involved some significant events, listed below.

Astronomy and space exploration

• January 30 – The Soviet Union launches the first Elektron satellites.
• Spring – First recognition of cosmic microwave background radiation as a detectable phenomenon.^[1] The discovery and confirmation of the Cosmic microwave background in 1964 secured the Big Bang as the best theory of the origin and evolution of the universe.
• March 20 – The precursor of the European Space Agency, ESRO (European Space Research Organization) is established (under an agreement of June 14, 1962).
• July 31 – Ranger program: Ranger 7 sends back the first close-up photographs of the Moon; images are 1,000 times clearer than anything ever seen from Earth-bound telescopes.
• October 12 – The Soviet Union launches the Voskhod 1 into Earth orbit as the first spacecraft with a multi-person crew and the first flight without space suits (the crew wouldn't fit in the space capsule otherwise).

Biology

• British molecular biologist Robin Holliday proposes existence of the Holliday junction in nucleic acid.

Computer science

• April 7 – IBM announces the System/360, in six models with 32-bit architecture.
• May 1 – John George Kemeny and Thomas Eugene Kurtz run the first program created in BASIC (Beginners' All-purpose Symbolic Instruction Code), an easy to learn high level programming language that will eventually be included on many computers and even some games consoles.
• PL/I (Programming Language I), a block-structured computer language, is created by George Radin, while at IBM.
• Programma 101 is announced at the World's Fair. Invented by the Italian engineer Pier Giorgio Perotto, It is one of the first commercial desktop programmable calculators.

Earth sciences

• March 27 (Good Friday) – Great Alaskan earthquake, the second most powerful known, with a magnitude of 9.2.^[2]
• Swiss geologist Augusto Gansser publishes Geology of the Himalayas.

History of science and technology

• January 23 – The Smithsonian Institution's Museum of History and Technology opens to the public in Washington, D.C.^[3]

Mathematics

• Paul Cohen proves the independence of the continuum hypothesis.^[4]
• Jacques Tits publishes significant work on group theory.^[5]

Paleontology

• August – John Ostrom identifies remains of the dinosaur Deinonychus in Montana, significant in being a small, agile species closely related to the birds.^[6]

Physics

• Three papers are published by Robert Brout and François Englert,^[7][8] Peter Higgs,^[9] and Gerald Guralnik, Dick Hagen, and Tom Kibble,^[10][11] predicting the Higgs boson and Higgs mechanism (or Englert–Brout–Higgs–Guralnik–Hagen–Kibble mechanism) which provides the means by which gauge bosons can acquire non-zero masses in the process of spontaneous symmetry breaking.^[12] As part of Physical Review Letters' 50th anniversary celebration, the journal will recognize each of these contributions as milestone papers in its history.^[13]
• Existence of the charm quark is speculated by James Bjorken and Sheldon Glashow.^[14]
• John Stewart Bell publishes a paper on the EPR paradox originating Bell's theorem.^[15]

Physiology and medicine

• January 11 – U.S. Surgeon General Luther Terry reports that smoking may be hazardous to health in the first such statement from the Federal government of the United States.
• January 16 – First angioplasty carried out, on the superficial femoral artery by U.S. interventional radiologist Charles Dotter.^[16][17]
• January 23 – First heart transplantation on a human, using a chimpanzee heart, carried out by U.S. surgeon James D. Hardy on Boyd Rush, but the organ is rejected after a few hours.
• March 28 – The Epstein-Barr virus is first described, by Anthony Epstein, Bert Achong and Yvonne Barr in London.^[18]
• June 27 – Iain Macintyre's group reports it has isolated and sequenced the newly-discovered hormone calcitonin and demonstrates its origin in the parafollicular cells of the thyroid gland.^[19]
• Jerome Horwitz synthesizes zidovudine (AZT), an antiviral drug that will come to be used in treating HIV.
• Temazepam first synthesized.
• Lesch–Nyhan syndrome is first described, by Drs Michael Lesch and William Nyhan.
• Fernando Alves Martins of Portugal applies optical fiber technology to a gastrocamera to produce the first such device with a flexible fiberscope, for use in esophagogastroduodenoscopy.^[20]

Psychology

• Publication of Eric Berne's book Games People Play: The Psychology of Human Relationships.

Technology

• October – Dr. Robert Moog demonstrates his prototype synthesizers.^[21]
• Farrington Daniels' book Direct Use of the Sun's Energy is published.^[22]

Publications

• Science Citation Index begins publication.

Awards

• Nobel Prizes
  • Physics – Charles Hard Townes, Nicolay Gennadiyevich Basov, Aleksandr Prokhorov
  • Chemistry – Dorothy Crowfoot Hodgkin
  • Medicine – Konrad Bloch, Feodor Lynen

Births

• January 2 – Michael J. Horowitz, American electrical engineer.
• June 5 – Dukagjin Pupovci, Kosovo Albanian professor^[23]
• February 19 – Jennifer Doudna, American biochemist.^[24]
• August 25 – Maxim Kontsevich, Russian mathematician.

Deaths

• February 5 – Matilde E. Moisant (born 1878), American pioneer aviator.
• February 20 – Verena Holmes (born 1889), English mechanical engineer and inventor.
• April 14 – Tatiana Ehrenfest-Afanaseva (born 1876), Russian-born Dutch mathematician.
• April 24 – Gerhard Domagk (born 1895), German winner of the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine.
• May 30 – Leó Szilárd (born 1898), Hungarian-American physicist.
• October – Guy Stewart Callendar (born 1898), English thermodynamic engineer and climatologist.
• December 1 – J. B. S. Haldane (born 1892), British geneticist.
• December 17 – Victor Franz Hess (born 1883), American physicist.
• December 30 – Hans Gerhard Creutzfeldt (born 1885), German neuropathologist.

References