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The year 1964 in science and technology involved some significant events, listed below.
- 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).
- British molecular biologist Robin Holliday proposes existence of the Holliday junction in nucleic acid.
- 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.
- 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.
- January 23 – The Smithsonian Institution's Museum of History and Technology opens to the public in Washington, D.C.[3]
- Paul Cohen proves the independence of the continuum hypothesis.[4]
- Jacques Tits publishes significant work on group theory.[5]
- August – John Ostrom identifies remains of the dinosaur Deinonychus in Montana, significant in being a small, agile species closely related to the birds.[6]
- 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]
- 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]
- Publication of Eric Berne's book Games People Play: The Psychology of Human Relationships in the United States.
- October – Dr. Robert Moog demonstrates his prototype synthesizers.[21]
- Farrington Daniels' book Direct Use of the Sun's Energy is published.[22]
- Science Citation Index begins publication.
- 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
- 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.
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