1966 in science explained

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.^[1]
• December 15 – Janus, one of the moons of Saturn, is identified by Audouin Dollfus (it had been first photographed on October 29).^[2]
• 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.^[3]
• 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.^[4]

Mathematics

• The Fabius function is published.^[5]
• Chen Jingrun publishes Chen's theorem: every sufficiently large even number can be written as the sum of a prime and a semiprime.^[6]
• 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^[7] 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.^{[8] [9]}
• 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.^[10]

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.^[11]

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.^[12]
• May 2 – Scottish inventor James Goodfellow obtains a UK patent for an automated teller machine using a plastic card and PIN.^[13]
• October 16 – The "Caspian Sea Monster" ground-effect vehicle first flies in the Soviet Union.^[14]
• 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.^[15]
• 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.

Notes and References

1. Web site: Eye witness accounts of the 1966 Leonid Storm. P. Jenniskens/NASA-ARC. 2011-10-13.
2. Gingerich. Owen. Probable New Satellite of Saturn. 1967-01-03. discovery. IAU Circular. 1987. 2011-12-28. .
3. Book: Turner, Vivienne . McKay, G. M.. 27. Burramyidae. Walton, D.W. . Richardson, B. J. . 1989. Fauna of Australia, Volume 1B: Mammalia. Canberra. Australian Government Publishing Service. 0-644-06056-5.
4. The "revolution" of Plate Tectonics in earth sciences and the relationship between science, reason and truth. Xavier. Le Pichon. Summer 2013. 5. Euresis Journal. 2014-11-25. https://web.archive.org/web/20140308092112/http://www.euresisjournal.org/public/article/pdf/LePichon.pdf. 2014-03-08. dead.
5. Fabius. Jaap. A probabilistic example of a nowhere analytic -function. 0197656. 1966. Zeitschrift für Wahrscheinlichkeitstheorie und Verwandte Gebiete. 5. 2 . 173–174. 10.1007/bf00536652. 122126180 .
6. Book: Crilly, Tony. 50 Mathematical Ideas you really need to know. London. Quercus. 2007. 978-1-84724-008-8. 37.
7. Lander . L. J. . Parkin . T. R.. 1966. Counterexample to Euler's conjecture on sums of like powers. Bull. Amer. Math. Soc. . 10.1090/S0002-9904-1966-11654-3 . 72 . 6 . 1079. free .
8. Birth Control: The Morning-After Pill. https://web.archive.org/web/20080408110025/http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,901858,00.html. dead. April 8, 2008. Time. 1966-05-06. 2010-05-01.
9. Postcoital contraception. IPPF Medical Bulletin. 1. 4. 3. 1967. 12254703.
10. News: Sir David Jack, who has died aged 87, was the scientific brain behind the rise of the pharmaceuticals company Glaxo. The Daily Telegraph. London. 2011-11-17. live. https://web.archive.org/web/20111125011155/http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/obituaries/finance-obituaries/8897458/Sir-David-Jack.html. 2011-11-25.
11. Rett. A.. On an unusual brain atrophy syndrome in hyperammonemia in childhood. German. Wiener medizinische Wochenschrift. 116. 37. 723–6. September 1966. 5300597.
12. K. C.. Kao. G. A.. Hockham. July 1966. Dielectric-fibre surface waveguides for optical frequencies. Proceedings of the Institution of Electrical Engineers. 113. 7. 1151–1158. 10.1049/piee.1966.0189.
13. UK Patent No.1,197,183. Web site: The man who really invented the cash machine. Steven. Brocklehurst. 2017-06-27. BBC News. 2021-05-16.
14. Book: Komissarov, Sergey. Russia's Ekranoplans: the Caspian Sea Monster and other WiG craft. 2002. Midland Publishing. Hinkley. 978-1857801460.
15. Press release: The Nobel Prize in Chemistry 2022. 2022-10-05. The Nobel Prize. 2022-10-06.