The year 2008 in science had some important events, listed below.

• January 15 - NASA's MESSENGER spacecraft makes its first flyby of Mercury at 200 km height.
• August 1 - Total solar eclipse that could be seen in Canada, Siberia, Mongolia and northern China.
• October 6 - NASA's MESSENGER spacecraft makes the second flyby of Mercury.

• April 13 - John Archibald Wheeler, theoretical physicist
• April 16 - Edward Norton Lorenz, mathematician and meteorologist
• April 29 - Albert Hofmann, chemist
• May 15 - Willis Lamb, physicist, winner of the 1955 Nobel Prize in Physics