1965 in science

The year 1965 in science and technology involved some significant events, listed below.

Astronomy and space exploration

• February 20 – Ranger 8 crashes into the Moon after a successful mission of photographing possible landing sites for the Apollo program astronauts.
• March 23 – NASA launches Gemini 3, the United States' first two-person space flight (crew: Gus Grissom and John Young).
• November 16 – Venera program: The Soviet Union launches the Venera 3 space probe from Baikonur, Kazakhstan toward Venus. (On March 1, 1966, it becomes the first spacecraft to reach the surface of another planet).
• November 26 – At the Hammaguira launch facility in the Sahara Desert, France launches a Diamant-A rocket with its first satellite, Asterix-1 on board, becoming the third country to enter space.
• Discovery of NML Cygni, a red hypergiant and the largest star known, at about 1,650 times the Sun's radius.

Biology

• February 4 – Trofim Lysenko is removed from his post as director of the Institute of Genetics at the Academy of Sciences in the Soviet Union and Lysenkoist theories subjected to criticism.^[1][2]
• Emile Zuckerkandl and Linus Pauling name their concept of the molecular clock.^[3][4]
• The Parma wallaby, thought for around 70 years to be extinct, is rediscovered on Kawau Island (near Auckland).
• W. Keble Martin publishes The Concise British Flora in Colour.
• The "brain-eating amoeba" Naegleria fowleri is detected for the first time.

Chemistry

• Kevlar high-strength para-aramid synthetic fiber is developed by Stephanie Kwolek at DuPont.^[5][6]
• Peter Hirsch, Archibald Howie, Robin Nicholson, D. W. Pashley and Michael J. Whelan publish Electron Microscopy of Thin Crystals.

Climatology

• November 5 – US president Lyndon Johnson’s science advisory committee sends him a report entitled Restoring the Quality of Our Environment, the introduction to which states: "Pollutants have altered on a global scale the carbon dioxide content of the air and the lead concentrations in ocean waters and human populations."^[7]

Computer science

• March 22 – Digital Equipment Corporation launch the 12-bit PDP-8, the first successful commercial minicomputer, which will sell more than 50,000 systems, the most of any computer up to this date.^[8]
• April 19 – Gordon Moore describes the exponential growth trend in computing power which will become known as Moore's law.^{[9][10][11][12]}

History of science

• Ralph Lapp publishes The New Priesthood: The Scientific Elite and the Uses of Power in the United States.

Mathematics

• James Ax and Simon B. Kochen make the first proof of the Ax–Kochen theorem.^[13]
• Lotfi Zadeh develops fuzzy logic.^[14]

Physics

• January – Mathematician Roger Penrose publishes a key paper on gravitational collapse and space-time singularities.^[15]

Physiology and medicine

• English paediatrician Harry Angelman first describes Angelman syndrome.^[16]
• English neurologist Victor Dubowitz first describes Dubowitz syndrome.
• Frank Pantridge installs the first portable defibrillator, in a Belfast ambulance.

Psychology

• Konrad Lorenz publishes Evolution and Modification of Behavior.

Technology

• January – Bryan Whitby and S. C. Cummins file a United Kingdom patent application for mobile ice cream producing equipment with the soft serve units powered off the ice cream van's drive mechanism (rather than a separate generator), which becomes a global standard.^[17][18]

Awards

• Nobel Prizes
  • Physics – Sin-Itiro Tomonaga, Julian Schwinger, Richard P. Feynman
  • Chemistry – Robert Burns Woodward
  • Medicine – François Jacob, André Lwoff, Jacques Monod
• Order of Merit: Dorothy Hodgkin

Births

• June 16 – Andrea M. Ghez, American astronomer.
• June 21 – Yang Liwei, Chinese astronaut.
• October 11 – Juan Ignacio Cirac Sasturain, Spanish physicist.

Deaths

• August 28 – Giulio Racah (born 1909), Israeli physicist.
• September 4 – Albert Schweitzer (born 1875), Alsatian medical missionary.
• September 20 – Arthur Holmes (born 1890), English geologist.
• October 12 – Paul Hermann Müller (born 1899), Swiss chemist, winner of the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine in 1948.
• November 11 – Ronald Hatton (born 1886), English pomologist.

References