1968 in science

The year 1968 in science and technology included many events, some of which are listed below.

Astronomy

• Neutron stars; Thomas Gold explains the recently discovered radio pulsars as rapidly rotating neutron stars and subsequent observations confirm the suggestion (T. Gold, Nature 218, 731–732, 1968)

Space exploration

• October 11 – Apollo program: NASA launches Apollo 7, the first manned Apollo mission, with astronauts Wally Schirra, Don Fulton Eisele and R. Walter Cunningham aboard. Goals for the mission include the first live television broadcast from orbit and testing the lunar module docking maneuver.
• December 24 – Apollo 8 enters Moon orbit. Frank Borman, Jim Lovell and William A. Anders are the first humans to see the far side of the Moon and planet Earth as a whole.

Medicine

• January 2 – Dr. Christian Barnard performs the first successful heart transplant.

Awards

• Nobel Prizes
  • Physics – Luis Alvarez
  • Chemistry – Lars Onsager
  • Medicine – Robert W. Holley, Har Gobind Khorana, Marshall W. Nirenberg
• Turing Award – Richard Hamming

Births

Deaths

• March 27 – Yuri Gagarin (b. 1934), cosmonaut, the first man in space.
• April 1 – Lev Davidovich Landau (b. 1908), Russian physicist.
• July 28 – Otto Hahn (b. 1879), German physicist who received the 1944 Nobel Prize in Chemistry.