1976 in science

Astronomy and space exploration

• March – Faber–Jackson relation presented by astronomers Sandra M. Faber and Robert Earl Jackson.
• June 18 – Gravity Probe A, a satellite-based experiment to test Albert Einstein's theory of general relativity, is launched.
• July 20 – Viking program: The Viking 1 lander successfully lands on Mars.
• July 31 – NASA releases the famous 'Face on Mars' photograph, taken by Viking 1
• August 7 – Viking program: Viking 2 enters into orbit around Mars.
• August 22 – Luna program: Luna 24 successfully makes an unmanned landing on the Moon, the last for 37 years.
• September 3 – Viking program: The Viking 2 spacecraft lands at Utopia Planitia on Mars and takes the first close-up color photographs of the planet's surface.
• September 17 – Space Shuttle Enterprise rolled out.Universe, a public domain film produced by Lester Novros for NASA, is released.

Aviation

• January 21 – Concorde begins commercial flights.
• December 8 – First flight of production General Dynamics F-16 Fighting Falcon.

Chemistry

• May – Marion M. Bradford publishes the Bradford protein assay method.
• Oberlin, Endo and Koyama publish evidence of the creation of carbon nanotubes using a vapor-growth technique.

Computer science

• January – The Cray-1, the first commercially developed supercomputer, is released by Seymour Cray's Cray Research. Model 001 is installed at Los Alamos National Laboratory in the United States.
• March – Peter Chen's key paper on the entity–relationship model is published, having first been presented at a conference in September 1975.
• April 1 – Apple Computer Company is formed by Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak in California and on April 11 they launch their first computer, the Apple I, for the U.S. hobbyist market.
• November 26 – Little-known company Microsoft is officially registered with the Office of the Secretary of State of New Mexico.
• December – Release of Electric Pencil, the first word processor for home computers.

Cryptography

• November – An asymmetric-key cryptosystem is published by Whitfield Diffie and Martin Hellman who disclose the Diffie–Hellman key exchange method of public-key agreement for public-key cryptography.

History of science and technology

• October 3 – Opening of the Dibner Library of the History of Science and Technology at the Smithsonian Institution's National Museum of History and Technology in Washington, D.C.
• Jean Gimpel's The Medieval Machine is published.

Mathematics

• July 11 – Keuffel and Esser manufacture the last slide rule in the United States.
• Imre Lakatos' Proofs and Refutations: the Logic of Mathematical Discovery is published posthumously.
• The four color theorem is proved by Kenneth Appel and Wolfgang Haken, the first major theorem to be proved using a computer.
• Andrei Suslin and Daniel Quillen independently prove the Quillen–Suslin theorem about the triviality of algebraic vector bundles on affine space.
• George Andrews locates a long lost manuscript containing over six hundred mathematical formulas by Srinivasa Ramanujan from 1919-1920 in a collection of materials bequeathed by G. N. Watson in the Wren Library of Trinity College, Cambridge.

Paleontology

• Fossil footprints of bipedal hominini from 3.6M years BP are found at Laetoli in Tanzania by Andrew Hill when visiting Mary Leakey.

Physiology, medicine and psychology

• July 27 – Delegates attending an American Legion convention at The Bellevue-Stratford Hotel in Philadelphia, US, begin falling ill with a form of pneumonia: this will eventually be recognised as the first outbreak of Legionnaires' disease and will end in the deaths of 29 attendees.
• August 26 – The Ebola virus first emerges in outbreaks of viral hemorrhagic fever in Yambuku, Zaire, followed by outbreaks in Sudan.
• October 1–December 16 – Program of mass vaccination in the United States against the 1976 swine flu outbreak, suspended due to public fears over side-effects.
• October 28 – British evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins' book The Selfish Gene is published, introducing the term memetics.
• Dementia with Lewy bodies is first described by Japanese psychiatrist and neuropathologist Kenji Kosaka.
• The term Münchausen syndrome by proxy is first coined by John Money and June Faith Werlwas.
• Norman F. Dixon publishes On the Psychology of Military Incompetence.

Technology

• The first laser printer is introduced by IBM.

Awards

• Nobel Prizes
• * Physics – Burton Richter, Samuel C. C. Ting
• * Chemistry – William N. Lipscomb
• * Medicine – Baruch S. Blumberg, Daniel Carleton Gajdusek
• Turing Award – Michael O. Rabin, Dana Scott

Births

• July 27 – Demis Hassabis, British artificial intelligence researcher.
• November 19 – Jack Dorsey, American web developer.

Deaths

• January 19 – Hidetsugu Yagi, Japanese electrical engineer.
• February 1
• * Werner Heisenberg, German theoretical physicist.
• * George Whipple, American pathologist, winner of the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine in 1934.
• April 5 – Wilder Penfield, American-Canadian neurosurgeon.
• April 21 – Carl Benjamin Boyer, American historian of mathematics.
• May 31 – Jacques Monod, French biochemist, winner of the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine in 1965.
• August 18 – Shintaro Uda, Japanese electrical engineer.
• October 5 – Lars Onsager, Norwegian American chemist.
• September 16 – Bertha Lutz, Brazilian herpetologist and women's rights campaigner.
• September 26 – Pál Turán, Hungarian mathematician.
• November 5 – Willi Hennig, German entomologist and pioneer of cladistics.