1960 in science
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The year 1960 in science and technology involved some significant events, listed below.
Contents |
[edit] Astronomy and space exploration
- March 14 - Jodrell Bank Observatory in England makes radio contact with the U.S. Pioneer 5 probe over a distance of 407,000 miles (655,000 km).[1]
- April–July - Cornell University astronomer Frank Drake begins searching for signs of extraterrestrial intelligence with Project Ozma at the National Radio Astronomy Observatory at Green Bank, West Virginia.
- April 13 - The United States launches navigation satellite Transit I-b.
- May 15 - Sputnik program: The Soviet Union launches Sputnik 4 into Earth orbit.
- June 3 - British-born American theoretical physicist Freeman Dyson proposes the idea of Dyson spheres.[2]
- August 12 - First experimental Project Echo passive communications satellite goes into orbit.[3]
- August 19 - Sputnik program: The Soviet Union launches Sputnik 5 with the dogs Belka and Strelka, forty mice, two rats and a variety of plants. The spacecraft will return to earth the next day and all animals will be recovered safely.
- Dutch mathematician Hans Freudenthal invents the artificial language Lincos, intended for communication with extraterrestrial intelligence.
[edit] Biology
- February 13
- Max Perutz publishes the structure of hemoglobin.[4]
- John Kendrew publishes the structure of myoglobin.[5]
- July - Robert Burns Woodward publishes a total synthesis of chlorophyl.[6]
- Jacques Ruffié invents hemotyping.
- Juan Oro finds that concentrated solutions of ammonium cyanide in water can produce the nucleotide adenine.
- Four independent researchers (Sam Weiss, Jerard Hurwitz, Audrey Stevens and J. Bonner) discover the bacterial RNA polymerase that regulates the polymerization of nucleotides under the control of DNA.[7]
- Climatron geodesic dome greenhouse opens at the Missouri Botanical Garden in St. Louis.[8]
[edit] Computer science
- John McCarthy of MIT publishes the Lisp programming language.[9]
[edit] Earth sciences
- May 22 - Valdivia earthquake: Chile's subduction fault ruptures from Talcahuano to the Taitao Peninsula (with its epicenter near Lumaco), causing the most powerful earthquake on record (with a magnitude of 9.5) and a tsunami.
[edit] Exploration
- January 23 - Jacques Piccard and Don Walsh reach bottom in the Mariana Trench in United States Navy bathyscaphe Trieste at a depth of 10,916 m.
- May 10 - The nuclear submarine USS Triton, under the command of Captain Edward L. Beach, Jr., completes the first underwater circumnavigation of the Earth.
[edit] Mathematics
- Wacław Sierpiński proves the existence of Sierpinski numbers.
- In the classification of finite simple groups, Michio Suzuki and Rimhak Ree introduce Suzuki–Ree groups;[10][11] and John G. Thompson, Walter Feit and Marshall Hall prove that a group with a fixed-point-free automorphism of prime order is nilpotent, and that all finite simple CN groups of odd order are cyclic.[12]
[edit] Medicine
- April 15 - William C. Chardack implants the first fixed-rate cardiac pacemaker with mercury battery, designed by Wilson Greatbatch.[13]
- May 9 - The U.S. Food and Drug Administration announces that it will approve birth control as an additional indication for Searle's Enovid, making it the world's first approved combined oral contraceptive pill.
- June 6 - The American Heart Association announces a strong statistical association between heavy cigarette smoking and coronary heart disease.[14]
[edit] Meteorology
- April 1 - The United States launches the first weather satellite, TIROS-1.
[edit] Paleontology
- November 4 - OH 7, first fragments of Homo habilis, discovered by Jonathan Leakey at Olduvai Gorge, Tanzania.[15]
[edit] Physics
- March 22 - Arthur Leonard Schawlow and Charles Hard Townes receive the first patent for a laser.
- May 16 - Theodore Maiman demonstrates the first working laser, a ruby laser, at Hughes Research Laboratories.
[edit] Technology
- A tungsten halogen lamp bulb is patented by General Electric engineer Fredrick Moby.[16]
[edit] Births
- May 3 - Jaron Lanier, American computer scientist.
- October 18 - Craig Mello, American biologist.
- December 24 - Carol Vorderman, British mathematician.
[edit] Deaths
- May 8 - J. H. C. Whitehead (born 1904), British mathematician.
- June 17 - Sir Harold Gillies (born 1882), New Zealand-born plastic surgeon.
[edit] References
- ^ "Radio telescope makes space history". On This Day. BBC. 1960-03-14. Archived from the original on 7 March 2008. http://news.bbc.co.uk/onthisday/hi/dates/stories/march/14/newsid_2566000/2566961.stm. Retrieved 2008-02-11.
- ^ Dyson, Freeman J. (3 June 1960). "Search for Artificial Stellar Sources of Infrared Radiation". Science 131 (3414): 1667–1668. Bibcode 1960Sci...131.1667D. doi:10.1126/science.131.3414.1667. PMID 17780673.
- ^ "Echo 1, 1A, 2 Quicklook". Mission and Spacecraft Library. NASA. http://samadhi.jpl.nasa.gov/msl/QuickLooks/echoQL.html. Retrieved February 6, 2010.
- ^ Perutz, M. F. et al. (13 February 1960). "Structure of Hæmoglobin: A Three-Dimensional Fourier Synthesis at 5.5-Å. Resolution, Obtained by X-Ray Analysis" (PDF). Nature 185 (4711): 416–22. Bibcode 1960Natur.185..416P. doi:10.1038/185416a0. PMID 18990801. http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v185/n4711/pdf/185416a0.pdf. Retrieved 2011-06-23.
- ^ Kendrew, J. C. et al. (13 February 1960). "Structure of Myoglobin: A Three-Dimensional Fourier Synthesis at 2 Å. Resolution" (PDF). Nature 185 (4711): 422-7. Bibcode 1960Natur.185..422K. doi:10.1038/185422a0. PMID 18990802. http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v185/n4711/pdf/185422a0.pdf. Retrieved 2011-06-23.
- ^ Woodward, R. B. et al. (1960). "The Total Synthesis of Chlorophyll" (PDF). Journal of the American Chemical Society 82: 3800–3802. doi:10.1021/ja01499a093. http://pubs.acs.org/doi/pdf/10.1021/ja01499a093. Retrieved 2011-06-23.
- ^ Hurwitz, Jerard (December 2005). "The Discovery of RNA Polymerase" (PDF). Journal of Biological Chemistry 280 (52): 42477–85. doi:10.1074/jbc.X500006200. PMID 16230341. http://www.jbc.org/content/280/52/42477.full.pdf. Retrieved 2011-06-23.
- ^ "Climatron Conservatory – History and Architecture". Missouri Botanical Garden. http://www.mobot.org/hort/gardens/CLhistarchit.shtml. Retrieved 2011-08-17.
- ^ McCarthy, John (1960). "Recursive Functions of Symbolic Expressions and Their Computation by Machine". Communications of the ACM 3 (4): 184–195. doi:10.1145/367177.367199. http://portal.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=367199. Retrieved 2011-11-18.
- ^ Suzuki, Michio (1960). "A new type of simple groups of finite order". Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (United States) 46: 868–870. ISSN 0027-8424. JSTOR 70960. MR 0120283.
- ^ Ree, Rimhak (1960). "A family of simple groups associated with the simple Lie algebra of type (G2)". Bulletin of the American Mathematical Society 66: 508–510. doi:10.1090/S0002-9904-1960-10523-X. ISSN 0002-9904. MR 0125155. http://www.ams.org/journals/bull/1960-66-06/S0002-9904-1960-10523-X/home.html. Retrieved 9 October 2011.
- ^ Feit, Walter; Thompson, John G.; Hall, Marshall, Jr. (1960). "Finite groups in which the centralizer of any non-identity element is nilpotent". Mathematische Zeitschrift 74: 1–17. doi:10.1007/BF01180468. MR 0114856.
- ^ Adam, John (1999-02-05). "Making Hearts Beat". InnovativeLives. Lemelson Center. http://invention.smithsonian.org/centerpieces/ilives/lecture09.html. Retrieved 2011-09-29.
- ^ "Smoking is Linked to Heart Disease". The New York Times: p. 36. June 7, 1960.
- ^ Leakey, Richard E. (1981). The Making of Mankind. Elsevier-Dutton Publishing Co., Inc.. pp. 65–66. ISBN 0-525-15055-2.
- ^ U.S. Patent 3,243,634. Bellis, Mary. "History of Lighting and Lamps". About.com. http://inventors.about.com/od/lstartinventions/a/lighting_2.htm. Retrieved 2011-12-19.
