1964 in science

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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 in the United States.

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.
• March 5 – Yoshua Bengio, French-born Canadian computer scientist.
• June 5 – Dukagjin Pupovci, Kosovo Albanian professor^[23]
• February 19 – Jennifer Doudna, American biochemist.^[24]
• August 25 – Maxim Kontsevich, Russian mathematician.
• Gillian Reid, Scottish-born inorganic chemist

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 pathologist and bacteriologist, winner of the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine.
• May 30 – Leó Szilárd (born 1898), Hungarian-American physicist.
• June 7 – Arthur O. Austin (born 1879), American electrical engineer.
• 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

1. In a brief paper by Soviet astrophysicists A. G. Doroshkevich and Igor Novikov. Penzias, A. A. (2006). "The origin of elements" (PDF). Nobel lecture. Nobel Foundation. Retrieved 2006-10-04.
2. "Largest Earthquakes in the World Since 1900". U.S. Geological Survey. 2012-07-18. Archived from the original on 2010-11-07. Retrieved 2012-09-05.
3. "Mission & History". National Museum of American History. March 2012. Retrieved 2018-02-14.
4. Crilly, T. (2007). 50 Mathematical Ideas you really need to know. Quercus. p. 73. ISBN 978-1-84724-008-8.
5. Tits, J. (1964). "Algebraic and abstract simple groups". Annals of Mathematics. Second Series. 80 (2): 313–329. doi:10.2307/1970394. JSTOR 1970394. MR 0164968.
6. Ostrom, J. H. (1969). "Osteology of Deinonychus antirrhopus, an unusual theropod from the Lower Cretaceous of Montana". Peabody Museum of Natural History Bulletin. 30: 1–165.
7. Englert, F.; Brout, R. (1964). "Broken Symmetry and the Mass of Gauge Vector Mesons". Physical Review Letters. 13 (9): 321–323. Bibcode:1964PhRvL..13..321E. doi:10.1103/PhysRevLett.13.321.
8. Brout, R.; Englert, F. (1998). "Spontaneous Symmetry Breaking in Gauge Theories: A Historical Survey". arXiv:hep-th/9802142.
9. Higgs, P. W. (1964). "Broken Symmetries and the Masses of Gauge Bosons". Physical Review Letters. 13 (16): 508–509. Bibcode:1964PhRvL..13..508H. doi:10.1103/PhysRevLett.13.508.
10. Guralnik, G. S.; Hagen, C. R.; Kibble, T. W. B. (1964). "Global Conservation Laws and Massless Particles". Physical Review Letters. 13 (20): 585–587. Bibcode:1964PhRvL..13..585G. doi:10.1103/PhysRevLett.13.585.
11. Guralnik, G. S. (2009). "The History of the Guralnik, Hagen and Kibble development of the Theory of Spontaneous Symmetry Breaking and Gauge Particles". International Journal of Modern Physics A. 24 (14): 2601–2627. arXiv:0907.3466. Bibcode:2009IJMPA..24.2601G. doi:10.1142/S0217751X09045431. S2CID 16298371.
12. Kibble, T. W. B. (2009). "Englert–Brout–Higgs–Guralnik–Hagen–Kibble mechanism". Scholarpedia. 4 (1): 6441. Bibcode:2009SchpJ...4.6441K. doi:10.4249/scholarpedia.6441.
13. Physical Review Letters 50th Anniversary Milestone Papers.
14. Bjørken, B. J.; Glashow, S. L. (1964). "Elementary particles and SU(4)". Physics Letters. 11 (3): 255–257. Bibcode:1964PhL....11..255B. doi:10.1016/0031-9163(64)90433-0.
15. Bell, John S. (1964). "On the Einstein Podolsky Rosen Paradox". Physics Physique Физика. 1 (3): 195–200. doi:10.1103/PhysicsPhysiqueFizika.1.195.
16. Dotter, C. T.; Judkins, M. P. (1964). "Transluminal Treatment of Arteriosclerotic Obstruction: Description of a New Technic and a Preliminary Report of Its Application". Circulation. 30 (5): 654–670. doi:10.1161/01.CIR.30.5.654. PMID 14226164.
17. Rösch, J.; Keller, F. S.; Kaufman, J. A. (2003). "The Birth, Early Years, and Future of Interventional Radiology". Journal of Vascular and Interventional Radiology. 14 (7): 841–853. doi:10.1097/01.RVI.0000083840.97061.5b. PMID 12847192.
18. Epstein, M. A.; Achong, B. G.; Barr, Y. M. (1964-03-28). "Virus particles in cultured lymphoblasts from Burkitt's lymphoma". The Lancet. 1 (7335): 702–703. doi:10.1016/S0140-6736(64)91524-7. PMID 14107961.
19. Foster, G. V.; Baghdiantz, A.; Kumar, M. A.; Slack, E.; Soliman, H. A.; MacIntyre, I. (1964). "Thyroid origin of Calcitonin". Nature. 202 (4939): 1303–1305. Bibcode:1964Natur.202.1303F. doi:10.1038/2021303a0. PMID 14210962. S2CID 2443410.
20. Martins, F. A. (30 June 2009). "O Endoscópio". Fernando Alves Martins' Blog (in Portuguese). Retrieved 2012-02-07.
21. Moog, R. A. (1965). "Voltage-Controlled Electronic Music Modules". Journal of the Audio Engineering Society. 13 (3): 200–206.
22. Yale University Press.
23. "See ECN Expert". South East European University. Archived from the original on 18 October 2010. Retrieved 18 July 2014.
24. "Jennifer Doudna | American biochemist". Encyclopedia Britannica. Retrieved 7 October 2020.