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.