1966 in science
The year 1966 in science and technology involved some significant events, listed below.
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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.[7]
- 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[8] announcing the result is one of the shortest published scientific articles ever published.
Physiology and medicine
- April 21 – An artificial heart is installed in the chest of Marcel DeRudder in a Houston, Texas, hospital.
- 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.[9][10]
- 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]
- October 16 – The "Caspian Sea Monster" ground-effect vehicle first flies in the Soviet Union.[13]
- Marie Van Brittan Brown originates the home security system in the United States.
Awards
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.
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.
- 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.
References
- "Eye witness accounts of the 1966 Leonid Storm". P. Jenniskens/NASA-ARC. Retrieved 2011-10-13.
- Gingerich, Owen (1967-01-03). "Probable New Satellite of Saturn" (discovery). IAU Circular. 1987. Retrieved 2011-12-28.
- Turner, Vivienne; McKay, G. M. (1989). "27. Burramyidae". In Walton, D.W.; Richardson, B. J. (eds.). Fauna of Australia, Volume 1B: Mammalia. Canberra: Australian Government Publishing Service. ISBN 0-644-06056-5.
- Le Pichon, Xavier (Summer 2013). "The "revolution" of Plate Tectonics in earth sciences and the relationship between science, reason and truth" (PDF). Euresis Journal. 5. Archived from the original (PDF) on 2014-03-08. Retrieved 2014-11-25.
- Fabius, Jaap (1966). "A probabilistic example of a nowhere analytic C ∞-function". Zeitschrift für Wahrscheinlichkeitstheorie und Verwandte Gebiete. 5: 173–174. doi:10.1007/bf00536652. MR 0197656.
- Crilly, Tony (2007). 50 Mathematical Ideas you really need to know. London: Quercus. p. 37. ISBN 978-1-84724-008-8.
- Mumford, David (1966), "Families of abelian varieties", Algebraic Groups and Discontinuous Subgroups (Proc. Sympos. Pure Math. 9, Boulder, Colo., 1965), Providence, R.I.: American Mathematical Society, pp. 347–351, MR 0206003
- Lander, L. J.; Parkin, T. R. (1966). "Counterexample to Euler's conjecture on sums of like powers". Bull. Amer. Math. Soc. 72 (6): 1079. doi:10.1090/S0002-9904-1966-11654-3.
- "Birth Control: The Morning-After Pill". Time. 1966-05-06. Retrieved 2010-05-01.
- "Postcoital contraception". IPPF Medical Bulletin. 1 (4): 3. 1967. PMID 12254703.
- Rett, A. (September 1966). "On an unusual brain atrophy syndrome in hyperammonemia in childhood". Wiener medizinische Wochenschrift (in German). 116 (37): 723–6. PMID 5300597.
- Kao, K. C.; Hockham, G. A. (July 1966). "Dielectric-fibre surface waveguides for optical frequencies". Proceedings of the Institution of Electrical Engineers. 113 (7): 1151–1158. doi:10.1049/piee.1966.0189.
- Komissarov, Sergey (2002). Russia's Ekranoplans: the Caspian Sea Monster and other WiG craft. Hinkley: Midland Publishing. ISBN 978-1857801460.
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