1966 in science

The year 1966 in science and technology involved some significant events, listed below.

Astronomy and space exploration

• February 3 – The unmanned Soviet Luna 9 spacecraft makes the first controlled rocket-assisted landing on the Moon.
• March 1 – Venera 3 Soviet space probe crashes on Venus becoming the first spacecraft to land on another planet's surface.
• March 16 – NASA spacecraft Gemini 8 (David Scott, Neil Armstrong) conducts the first docking in space, with an Agena target vehicle.
• March 31 – The Soviet Union launches Luna 10 which later becomes the first spacecraft to enter orbit around the Moon.
• April 3 – Luna 10 is the first manmade object to enter lunar orbit.
• May 25 – Explorer program: Satellite Explorer 32 (Atmosphere Explorer-B) is launched from the United States.
• July 18 – Gemini 10 (John Young, Michael Collins) is launched from the United States. After docking with an Agena target vehicle, the astronauts then set a world altitude record of 474 miles (763 km).
• August 10 – Lunar Orbiter 1, the first U.S. spacecraft to orbit the Moon, is launched.
• November 17 – Notable display of the Leonids over the Americas.
• December 15 – Janus, one of the moons of Saturn, is identified by Audouin Dollfus (it had been first photographed on October 29).
• December 18 – Epimetheus, another of the moons of Saturn, is discovered, but mistaken for Janus which shares its orbit and they are not distinguished until 1978.
• Mullard Space Science Laboratory established in England.

Biology

• The first live specimen of a mountain pygmy possum (Burramys parvus), Australia's only truly hibernating marsupial, previously known only from the fossil record, is discovered.
• German entomologist Willi Hennig's Phylogenetic Systematics is published in English, advancing the study of cladistics.

Computer science

• September 1 – While waiting at a bus stop Ralph H. Baer, an inventor with Sanders Associates in the United States, writes a four-page document that lays out the basic principles for creating a video game to be played on a television: the beginning of a multibillion-dollar industry.
• Martin Richards designs the BCPL programming language.
• Roger MacGowan and Frederick Ordway first suggest the concept of machine superorganisms in Intelligence in the Universe.

Earth science

• Walter C. Pitman and James Heirtzler present the "magic" Eltanin marine magnetic anomaly profile that confirms the hypothesis of seafloor spreading at mid-ocean ridges.

Mathematics

• The Fabius function is published.
• Chen Jingrun publishes Chen's theorem: every sufficiently large even number can be written as the sum of a prime and a semiprime.
• David Mumford introduces Mumford–Tate groups.
• Euler's sum of powers conjecture is disproven by L. J. Lander and T. R. Parkin when, through a direct computer search on a CDC 6600, they have found the counterexample 27⁵ + 84⁵ + 110⁵ + 133⁵ = 144⁵. Their paper announcing the result is one of the shortest published scientific articles ever published.

Pharmacology

• Gynecologist John McLean Morris and biologist Gertrude Van Wagenen at the Yale School of Medicine report the successful use of oral high-dose estrogen pills for post-coital contraception in women and rhesus macaque monkeys respectively.
• Salbutamol, a bronchodilator, is discovered by a team led by David Jack at the Allen & Hanburys laboratory in the UK; it is launched in 1969 under the trade name Ventolin.

Physiology and medicine

• April 21 – An artificial heart is installed in the chest of Marcel DeRudder in a Houston, Texas, hospital.
• Victor A. McKusick publishes the first edition of his catalogue of all known genes and genetic disorders, Mendelian Inheritance in Man.
• Long-term potentiation (LTP), the putative cellular mechanism of learning and memory, is first observed by Terje Lømo in Oslo, Norway.
• Andreas Rett first describes Rett syndrome.

Psychology

• Human Sexual Response is published by Masters and Johnson.
• On Aggression and Behind the Mirror are published by Konrad Lorenz.

Technology

• January – First proposals for optical fiber communication presented by Charles K. Kao with George Hockham.
• May 2 – Scottish inventor James Goodfellow obtains a UK patent for an automated teller machine using a plastic card and PIN.
• October 16 – The "Caspian Sea Monster" ground-effect vehicle first flies in the Soviet Union.
• Marie Van Brittan Brown originates the home security system in the United States.

Awards

• Fermi Prize – Lise Meitner and Otto Hahn
• Fields Medal in mathematics – Michael Atiyah, Paul Cohen, Alexander Grothendieck and Stephen Smale
• Nobel Prizes
  • Physics – Alfred Kastler
  • Chemistry – Robert S. Mulliken
  • Medicine – Peyton Rous, Charles Brenton Huggins
• Turing Award – Alan Perlis

Births

• February 23 – Didier Queloz, Swiss astronomer.
• April 14 – Polina Bayvel, Ukrainian-born optical communications engineer.
• April 21 – Chris Whitty, English epidemiologist, Chief Medical Officer for England.
• May 17 – Adrian Owen, English neuroscientist.
• June 13 – Grigori Perelman, Russian mathematician.
• July 8 – Ralf Altmeyer, German virologist.
• August 7 – Jimmy Wales, American internet entrepreneur.
• September 10 – Carolyn Bertozzi, American winner of the Nobel Prize in Chemistry.
• September 30 – Shankar Balasubramanian, Indian-born British biochemist.
• October 30 – Irene Tracey, English neuroscientist and academic administrator.
• Undated – Victor Vescovo, American explorer.

Deaths

• January 15 – Sergei Korolev (born 1907), Soviet space scientist.
• March 1 – Fritz Houtermans (born 1903), Prussian-born Dutch physicist.
• March 12 – Sydney Camm (born 1893), English aircraft designer.
• March 26 – Anna Johnson Pell Wheeler (born 1883), American mathematician.
• June 20 – Monsignor Georges Lemaître (born 1894), Belgian physicist.
• July 7 – George de Hevesy (born 1885), Hungarian winner of the Nobel Prize in Chemistry.
• August 10 – Felix Andries Vening Meinesz (born 1887), Dutch geophysicist.
• October 1 – Mary Logan Reddick (born 1914), African American neuroembryologist.
• October 3 – Rolf Maximilian Sievert (born 1896), Swedish physicist.