1966 in science

Overview of the events of 1966 in science

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1966 in science

1965

1967

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* Psychology
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* Dinosaurs' extinction

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

## Astronomy and space exploration

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* 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

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* 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

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* 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

[edit]

* 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

[edit]

* 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

[edit]

* 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

[edit]

* 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

[edit]

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

## Technology

[edit]

* 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.

## Awards

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* 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

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* 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.[17]
* September 30 – Shankar Balasubramanian, Indian-born British biochemist.
* October 30 – Irene Tracey, English neuroscientist and academic administrator.
* Undated – Victor Vescovo, American explorer.

## Deaths

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* 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.

## References

[edit]

1. ^ Christie, Robert. "Zenit Satellites - Zenit-2 variant". Zarya.info. Retrieved 2014-01-03.
2. ^ "Eye witness accounts of the 1966 Leonid Storm". P. Jenniskens/NASA-ARC. Retrieved 2011-10-13.
3. ^ Gingerich, Owen (1967-01-03). "Probable New Satellite of Saturn" (discovery). IAU Circular. 1987. Retrieved 2011-12-28.
4. ^ 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.
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.
6. ^ Fabius, Jaap (1966). "A probabilistic example of a nowhere analytic C ∞-function". Zeitschrift für Wahrscheinlichkeitstheorie und Verwandte Gebiete. 5 (2): 173–174\. doi:10.1007/bf00536652. MR 0197656. S2CID 122126180.C ∞-function&rft.volume=5&rft.issue=2&rft.pages=173-174&rft.date=1966&rft_id=https://mathscinet.ams.org/mathscinet-getitem?mr=0197656#id-name=MR&rft_id=https://api.semanticscholar.org/CorpusID:122126180#id-name=S2CID&rft_id=info:doi/10.1007/bf00536652&rft.aulast=Fabius&rft.aufirst=Jaap&rfr_id=info:sid/en.wikipedia.org:1966+in+science" class="Z3988">
7. ^ Crilly, Tony (2007). 50 Mathematical Ideas you really need to know. London: Quercus. p. 37\. ISBN 978-1-84724-008-8.
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
9. ^ 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.
10. ^ "Birth Control: The Morning-After Pill". Time. 1966-05-06. Archived from the original on April 8, 2008. Retrieved 2010-05-01.
11. ^ "Postcoital contraception". IPPF Medical Bulletin. 1 (4): 3. 1967. PMID 12254703.
12. ^ "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. Archived from the original on 2011-11-25.
13. ^ 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.
14. ^ 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.
15. ^ UK Patent No.1,197,183. Brocklehurst, Steven (2017-06-27). "The man who really invented the cash machine". BBC News. Retrieved 2021-05-16.
16. ^ Komissarov, Sergey (2002). Russia's Ekranoplans: the Caspian Sea Monster and other WiG craft. Hinkley: Midland Publishing. ISBN 978-1857801460.
17. ^ "Press release: The Nobel Prize in Chemistry 2022" (Press release). The Nobel Prize. 2022-10-05. Retrieved 2022-10-06.

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