1965 in science

List of years in science (table)
... 1955 1956 1957 1958 1959 1960 1961 ... 1962 1963 1964 1965 1966 1967 1968 ... 1969 1970 1971 1972 1973 1974 1975 ...
Art Archaeology Architecture Literature Music Philosophy 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.
• Emile Zuckerkandl and Linus Pauling name their concept of the molecular clock.
• 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.

Chemistry

• Kevlar high-strength para-aramid synthetic fiber is developed by Stephanie Kwolek at DuPont.
• 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."

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.
• April 19 – Gordon Moore describes the exponential growth trend in computing power which will become known as Moore's law.

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.
• Lotfi Zadeh develops fuzzy logic.

Physiology and medicine

• English paediatrician Harry Angelman first describes Angelman 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.

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 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.
• 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.