1966 in science

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 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.
• November – Notable display of the Leonids over the Americas.
• December 15 – Janus, one of the moons of Saturn, is identified by Audouin Dollfus.
• 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.

  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.

  Biology

• The first live specimen of a mountain pygmy possum, 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

• Martin Richards designs the BCPL programming language.
• Roger MacGowan and Frederick Ordway first suggest the concept of machine superorganisms in Intelligence in the Universe.

  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.

  Physiology and medicine

• 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.
• Victor A. McKusick publishes the first edition of his catalogue of all known genes and genetic disorders, Mendelian Inheritance in Man.
• Andreas Rett first describes Rett syndrome.

  Psychology

• Human Sexual Response is published by Masters and Johnson.
• On Aggression and are published by Konrad Lorenz.

  Technology

• January – First proposals for optical fiber communication presented by Charles K. Kao with George Hockham.
• 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

• Fields Prize in Mathematics: Michael Atiyah, Paul Joseph 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.

  Deaths

• January 15 – Sergei Korolev, Soviet space scientist.
• March 1 – Fritz Houtermans, Prussian-born Dutch physicist.
• March 12 – Sydney Camm, English aircraft designer.
• June 20 – Monsignor Georges Lemaître, Belgian physicist.
• July 7 – George de Hevesy, Hungarian winner of the Nobel Prize in Chemistry.
• August 10 – Felix Andries Vening Meinesz, Dutch geophysicist.
• October 1 – Mary Logan Reddick, African American neuroembryologist.
• October 3 – Rolf Maximilian Sievert, Swedish physicist.