1959 in science

The year 1959 in science and technology included many events, some of which are included below.

Astronomy and space exploration

• August 7 – The United States launches Explorer 6 from the Atlantic Missile Range in Cape Canaveral, Florida.
• September 15 – Russian probe Luna 2 sends back first photos of the far side of Earth's Moon.
• September 19 – Giuseppe Cocconi and Philip Morrison publish in Nature their seminal paper Searching for Interstellar Communications, establishing the scientific rationale for SETI.
• Physicist Freeman Dyson first proposes the hypothetical Dyson sphere.
• Little Joe 2, a mission in the Mercury program, carried Sam the monkey into space.

Biology

• January 1 – Cultivars of plants named after this date must be named in a modern language, not in Latin.

Computer science

• IBM shipped the transistor-based IBM 1401 mainframe.

Physics

• The neutrino is first experimentally detected, by Clyde Cowan and Fred Reines.
• Yakir Aharonov and David Bohm predict the Aharonov-Bohm effect.

Technology

• Agfa introduces the first fully automatic camera, the Optima.
• Eveready Battery engineer Lewis Urry invents the long-lasting alkaline battery.
• Pilkington Brothers patent the float glass process.

Awards

• Nobel Prizes
  • Physics – Emilio Gino Segrè, – Owen Chamberlain
  • Chemistry – Jaroslav Heyrovský
  • Medicine – Severo Ochoa, Arthur Kornberg

Births

• Russell Foley
• Henk-Jan van Tuyl
• December 25 – Michael P. Anderson (d. 2003), American astronaut.

Deaths