1963 in science

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The year 1963 in science and technology involved some significant events, listed below.

Astronomy, astrophysics and space exploration

• January 1 – Long-period comet C/1963 A1 (Ikeya) is discovered by a Japanese amateur.
• January 4 – Soviet Luna reaches Earth orbit but fails to reach the Moon.
• May 15 – Mercury program: NASA launches the last mission of the program Mercury 9. (On June 12 NASA Administrator James E. Webb tells Congress the program is complete.)
• July 26 – Roy Kerr submits for publication his discovery of the Kerr metric, an exact solution to the Einstein field equation of general relativity, predicting a rotating black hole.^[1]
• October 18 – Aboard the French Véronique AGI 47 sounding rocket, a bicolor cat designated C 341, later known as Félicette, becomes the first cat in space.
• November 1 – The Arecibo Observatory, with the world's largest single-dish radio telescope, officially opens in Arecibo, Puerto Rico.
• First definite identification of a radio source, 3C 48, with an optical object, later identified as a quasar, is published by Allan Sandage and Thomas A. Matthews;^[2] also Maarten Schmidt publishes significant observations on 3C 273.^[3]

Biology

• Geneticist J. B. S. Haldane coins the word "clone".
• Molecular biologist Emile Zuckerkandl and physical chemist Linus Pauling introduce the term paleogenetics.^[4]
• Konrad Lorenz publishes On Aggression (Das sogenannte Böse: Zur Naturgeschichte der Aggression).
• Niko Tinbergen poses his four questions to be asked of any animal behavior.^[5]
• Sydney Brenner proposes the use of Caenorhabditis elegans as a model organism for the investigation primarily of neural development in animals.

Cartography

• Robinson projection devised by Arthur H. Robinson.^[6]

Computing

• Ivan Sutherland writes the revolutionary Sketchpad program and runs it on the Lincoln TX-2 computer at Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

Earth sciences

• September 7 – British geophysicists Fred Vine and Drummond Matthews publish proof of seafloor spreading on the Atlantic Ocean floor.^[7][8]
• November 14 – The Icelandic volcanic island of Surtsey appears above sea level.

History of science and technology

• April 1 – Industrial Monuments Survey for the Ministry of Public Building and Works (Great Britain) commenced by Rex Wailes.
• Kenneth Hudson's Industrial Archaeology: an introduction published in London.
• Derek J. de Solla Price's Little Science, Big Science published in New York.

Mathematics

• Paul Cohen uses forcing to prove that the continuum hypothesis and the axiom of choice are independent from Zermelo–Fraenkel set theory.
• Walter Feit and John G. Thompson state the Feit–Thompson theorem.^[9]
• Edward Lorenz publishes his discovery of the 'butterfly effect', significant in the development of chaos theory.^[10]
• Atiyah–Singer index theorem announced by Michael Atiyah and Isadore Singer.^[11]

Medicine

• June – Guy Alexandre performs the first kidney transplantation from a heart-beating, brain-dead donor, at Saint Pierre Hospital, Leuven, Belgium.^[12]
• Thomas Starzl performs the first liver transplantation, at the University of Colorado Health Sciences Center.^[12]
• James D. Hardy performs the first lung transplantation.^[12]
• Measles vaccines are introduced commercially.^[13]

• American endocrinologist Grant Liddle identifies Liddle's syndrome.^[14]
• French pediatrician Jérôme Lejeune first describes cri du chat syndrome.^[15]
• Pentasomy X is first diagnosed.

Paleontology

• The type species of the early dinosaur Herrerasaurus, Herrerasaurus ischigualastensis from the north of Argentina, is described by Osvaldo Reig.^[16]

Physics

• David H. Frisch and J. H. Smith prove radioactive decay of mesons is slowed by their motion.^[17] (See Einstein's special relativity and general relativity.)

Psychology

• Stanley Milgram publishes the results of his shock experiment on obedience to authority figures.^[18]
• The term "contrafreeloading" was coined.

Technology

• Lava lamp invented by Edward Craven Walker.^[19]
• Mellotron Mark I electro-mechanical, polyphonic tape replay keyboard, developed and built in Aston, Birmingham, England, is marketed.
• Don Buchla begins to design an electronic music synthesizer in Berkeley, California.

Events

• November 23 – First episode of science fiction television series Doctor Who broadcast by the BBC in the United Kingdom.^[20][21][22]

Awards

• Nobel Prizes
  • Physics – Eugene Paul Wigner, Maria Goeppert-Mayer, J. Hans D. Jensen
  • Chemistry – Karl Ziegler, Giulio Natta
  • Medicine – Sir John Carew Eccles, Alan Lloyd Hodgkin, Andrew Fielding Huxley

Births

• January 4 – May-Britt Moser, Norwegian neuroscientist, winner of the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine.^[23]
• February 9 – Brian Greene, American theoretical physicist.
• February 10 – Vivian Wing-Wah Yam, Hong Kong chemist working on OLEDs
• March – Jin Li, Chinese geneticist.
• August 14 – Saiful Islam, Pakistani-born materials chemist.
• August 30 – Magdalena Zernicka-Goetz, Polish-born developmental biologist.
• W. Tecumseh Fitch, American-born evolutionary biologist.
• Daniel Jackson, English-born American computer scientist.

Deaths

• January 28 – Jean Piccard (born 1884), Swiss-born American chemist and explorer.
• February 5 – Barnum Brown (born 1873), American paleontologist.
• April 6 – Otto Struve (born 1897), Russian astronomer.
• May 11 – Herbert Spencer Gasser (born 1888), American physiologist, winner of the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine.
• May 19 – Walter Russell (born 1871), American polymath.
• June 16 – Eleanor Williams (born 1884), Australian bacteriologist and serologist.
• August 30 – Marietta Pallis (born 1882), British ecologist.
• October 13 – Alan A. Griffith (born 1893), English stress engineer.
• October 2 – Olga Lepeshinskaya (born 1871), Soviet Lysenkoist biologist.
• October 25 – Karl von Terzaghi (born 1883), Austrian "father of soil mechanics".
• November 13 – Margaret Murray (born 1863), Indian-English anthropologist and author.^[24]

References

1. Kerr, R. P. (1963). "Gravitational field of a spinning mass as an example of algebraically special metrics". Physical Review Letters. 11 (5): 237–238. Bibcode:1963PhRvL..11..237K. doi:10.1103/PhysRevLett.11.237.
2. Matthews, Thomas A.; Sandage, Allan R. (1963). "Optical Identification of 3c 48, 3c 196, and 3c 286 with Stellar Objects". The Astrophysical Journal. 138: 30–56. Bibcode:1963ApJ...138...30M. doi:10.1086/147615. Archived from the original on 2017-09-26. Retrieved 2019-08-07.
3. Schmidt, Maarten (1963). "3C 273: a star-like object with large red-shift". Nature. 197 (4872): 1040. Bibcode:1963Natur.197.1040S. doi:10.1038/1971040a0.
4. Pauling, L.; Zuckerkandl, E. (1963). "Chemical paleogenetics: molecular restoration studies of extinct forms of life". Acta Chemica Scandinavica. 17: 89. doi:10.3891/acta.chem.scand.17s-0009.
5. Tinbergen, Niko (1963). "On Aims and Methods in Ethology" (PDF). Zeitschrift für Tierpsychologie. 20 (4): 410–433. doi:10.1111/j.1439-0310.1963.tb01161.x. Archived from the original (PDF) on 2011-06-09. Retrieved 2011-03-17.
6. Snyder, John P. (1993). Flattening the Earth: Two Thousand Years of Map Projections. University of Chicago Press. ISBN 978-0-226-76747-5.
7. The Hutchinson Factfinder. Helicon. 1999. ISBN 978-1-85986-000-7.
8. Vine, F. J.; Matthews, D. H. (1963). "Magnetic Anomalies Over Oceanic Ridges". Nature. 199 (4897): 947–949. Bibcode:1963Natur.199..947V. doi:10.1038/199947a0. S2CID 4296143.
9. Feit, Walter; Thompson, John G. (1963). "Solvability of groups of odd order". Pacific Journal of Mathematics. 13 (3): 775–1029. doi:10.2140/pjm.1963.13.775. MR 0166261.
10. Lorenz, Edward N. (March 1963). "Deterministic Nonperiodic Flow". Journal of the Atmospheric Sciences. 20 (2): 130–141. Bibcode:1963JAtS...20..130L. doi:10.1175/1520-0469(1963)020<0130:DNF>2.0.CO;2.
11. Atiyah, Michael F.; Singer, Isadore M. (1963). "The Index of Elliptic Operators on Compact Manifolds". Bulletin of the American Mathematical Society. 69 (3): 422–433. doi:10.1090/S0002-9904-1963-10957-X.
12. Machado, Calixto (2005). "The first organ transplant from a brain-dead donor". Neurology. 64 (11): 1938–42. doi:10.1212/01.wnl.0000163515.09793.cb. PMID 15955947. S2CID 219219246.
13. Webb, Nicholas. "HSL Research Guides: Ernst Ludwig Wynder Autograph Collection: John Enders, Ph.D." guides.library.nymc.edu. New York Medical College Health Sciences Library. Retrieved 2021-02-13. In 1963, Pfizer introduced a deactivated measles vaccine, and Merck & Co introduced an attenuated measles vaccine.
14. Christy, Nicholas P. (1993). "Grant W. Liddle". Transactions of the American Clinical and Climatological Association. 104: xliii–xlv. PMC 2376630. PMID 1343432.
15. Lejeune, J.; et al. (1963). "3 Cases of partial deletion of the short arm of chromosome 5". Comptes rendus hebdomadaires des séances de l'Académie des Sciences (in French). 257: 3098–102. PMID 14095841.
16. Reig, O. A. (1963). "La presencia de dinosaurios saurisquios en los "Estratos de Ischigualasto" (Mesotriásico Superior) de las provincias de San Juan y La Rioja (República Argentina)". Ameghiniana (in Spanish). 3 (1): 3–20.
17. American Journal of Physics 31: 342-355.
18. Milgram, S (October 1963). "Behavioral Study of Obedience". Journal of Abnormal and Social Psychology. 67 (4): 371–378. CiteSeerX 10.1.1.599.92. doi:10.1037/h0040525. PMID 14049516.
19. "Edward Craven Walker | British inventor". Encyclopedia Britannica. Retrieved 11 March 2019.
20. Penguin Pocket On This Day. Penguin Reference Library. 2006. ISBN 978-0-14-102715-9.
21. Howe, David J.; Stammers, Mark; Walker, Stephen James (1994). The Handbook: The First Doctor — The William Hartnell Years 1963–1966. London: Virgin Books. p. 54. ISBN 978-0-426-20430-5.
22. "An Unearthly Child". Doctor Who: The Classic Series. BBC. 1995–2003. Retrieved 2012-06-08.
23. "The Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine 2014". NobelPrize.org. Retrieved 11 March 2019.
24. Sheppard, Kathleen L. (2013). The Life of Margaret Alice Murray: A Woman's Work in Archaeology. Lanham: Lexington. p. 223. ISBN 978-0-73917-417-3.