1963 in science
overview of natural science-related events during the year of 1963
The year 1963 in science and technology involved some significant events, listed below.
Astronomy, astrophysics and space exploration
January 1 – Long-period comet C/1963 A1 (Ikeya) is discovered by a Japanese amateur.
January 4 – Soviet Luna reaches Earth orbit but fails to reach the Moon.
May 15 – Mercury program: NASA launches the last mission of the program Mercury 9. (On June 12 NASA Administrator James E. Webb tells Congress the program is complete.)
July 26 – Roy Kerr submits for publication his discovery of the Kerr metric, an exact solution to the Einstein field equation of general relativity, predicting a rotating black hole.
October 18 – Aboard the French Véronique AGI 47 sounding rocket, a bicolor cat designated C 341, later known as Félicette, becomes the first cat in space.
November 1 – The Arecibo Observatory, with the world's largest single-dish radio telescope, officially opens in Arecibo, Puerto Rico.
First definite identification of a radio source, 3C 48, with an optical object, later identified as a quasar, is published by Allan Sandage and Thomas A. Matthews; also Maarten Schmidt publishes significant observations on 3C 273.
Biology
Geneticist J. B. S. Haldane coins the word "clone".
Molecular biologist Emile Zuckerkandl and physical chemist Linus Pauling introduce the term paleogenetics.
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This entry incorporates text from “1963 in science” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.