1966 in science
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| 1966 in science |
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The year 1966 in science and technology involved some significant events, listed below.
- 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 17 – Soviet Vostok-2 rocket serial U15001-09 carrying reconnaissance satellite Kosmos 112 is the first orbital launch from Plesetsk Cosmodrome.[1]
- 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.[2]
- December 15 – Janus, one of the moons of Saturn, is identified by Audouin Dollfus (it had been first photographed on October 29).[3]
- 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.[4]
- 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.[5]
Mathematics
- The Fabius function is published.[6]
- Chen Jingrun publishes Chen's theorem: every sufficiently large even number can be written as the sum of a prime and a semiprime.[7]
- David Mumford introduces Mumford–Tate groups.[8]
- 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[9] 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.[10][11]
- 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.[12]
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.[13]
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.[14]
- May 2 – Scottish inventor James Goodfellow obtains a UK patent for an automated teller machine using a plastic card and PIN.[15]
- October 16 – The "Caspian Sea Monster" ground-effect vehicle first flies in the Soviet Union.[16]
- Marie Van Brittan Brown originates the home security system in the United States.