1963 in science

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.
• 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.
• Konrad Lorenz publishes On Aggression.
• Niko Tinbergen poses his four questions to be asked of any animal behavior.
• Sydney Brenner proposes the use of Caenorhabditis elegans as a model organism for the investigation primarily of neural development in animals.

Cartography

• Robinson projection devised by Arthur H. Robinson.

Computing

• Ivan Sutherland writes the revolutionary Sketchpad program and runs it on the Lincoln TX-2 computer at Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

Earth sciences

• September 7 – British geophysicists Fred Vine and Drummond Matthews publish proof of seafloor spreading on the Atlantic Ocean floor.
• November 14 – The Icelandic volcanic island of Surtsey appears above sea level.

History of science and technology

• April 1 – Industrial Monuments Survey for the Ministry of Public Building and Works (Great Britain) commenced by Rex Wailes.
• Kenneth Hudson's Industrial Archaeology: an introduction published in London.
• Derek J. de Solla Price's Little Science, Big Science published in New York.

Mathematics

• Paul Cohen uses forcing to prove that the continuum hypothesis and the axiom of choice are independent from Zermelo–Fraenkel set theory.
• Walter Feit and John G. Thompson state the Feit–Thompson theorem.
• Edward Lorenz publishes his discovery of the 'butterfly effect', significant in the development of chaos theory.
• Atiyah–Singer index theorem announced by Michael Atiyah and Isadore Singer.

Medicine

• June – Guy Alexandre performs the first kidney transplantation from a heart-beating, brain-dead donor, at Saint Pierre Hospital, Leuven, Belgium.
• Thomas Starzl performs the first liver transplantation, at the University of Colorado Health Sciences Center.
• James D. Hardy performs the first lung transplantation.
• Measles vaccines are introduced commercially.
• American endocrinologist Grant Liddle identifies Liddle's syndrome.
• French pediatrician Jérôme Lejeune first describes cri du chat syndrome.
• Pentasomy X is first diagnosed.

Paleontology

• The type species of the early dinosaur Herrerasaurus, Herrerasaurus ischigualastensis from the north of Argentina, is described by Osvaldo Reig.

Physics

• David H. Frisch and J. H. Smith prove radioactive decay of mesons is slowed by their motion.

Psychology

• Stanley Milgram publishes the results of his shock experiment on obedience to authority figures.
• The term "contrafreeloading" was coined.

Technology

• Lava lamp invented by Edward Craven Walker.
• Mellotron Mark I electro-mechanical, polyphonic tape replay keyboard, developed and built in Aston, Birmingham, England, is marketed.
• Don Buchla begins to design an electronic music synthesizer in Berkeley, California.

Events

• November 23 – First episode of science fiction television series Doctor Who broadcast by the BBC in the United Kingdom.

Awards

• Nobel Prizes
• * Physics – Eugene Paul Wigner, Maria Goeppert-Mayer, J. Hans D. Jensen
• * Chemistry – Karl Ziegler, Giulio Natta
• * Medicine – Sir John Carew Eccles, Alan Lloyd Hodgkin, Andrew Fielding Huxley

Births

• January 4 – May-Britt Moser, Norwegian neuroscientist, winner of the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine.
• February 9 – Brian Greene, American theoretical physicist.
• February 10 – Vivian Wing-Wah Yam, Hong Kong chemist working on OLEDs
• March – Jin Li, Chinese geneticist.
• August 14 – Saiful Islam, Pakistani-born materials chemist.
• August 30 – Magdalena Zernicka-Goetz, Polish-born developmental biologist.
• W. Tecumseh Fitch, American-born evolutionary biologist.
• Daniel Jackson, English-born American computer scientist.

Deaths

• January 28 – Jean Piccard, Swiss-born American chemist and explorer.
• February 5 – Barnum Brown, American paleontologist.
• April 6 – Otto Struve, Russian astronomer.
• May 11 – Herbert Spencer Gasser, American physiologist, winner of the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine.
• May 19 – Walter Russell, American polymath.
• June 16 – Eleanor Williams, Australian bacteriologist and serologist.
• August 30 – Marietta Pallis, British ecologist.
• October 13 – Alan A. Griffith, English stress engineer.
• October 2 – Olga Lepeshinskaya, Soviet Lysenkoist biologist.
• October 25 – Karl von Terzaghi, Austrian "father of soil mechanics".
• November 13 – Margaret Murray, Indian-English anthropologist and author.