1971 in science

The year 1971 in science and technology involved some significant events, listed below.

Astronomy and space exploration

• January 31 - Apollo program: Astronauts aboard Apollo 14 lift off for a mission to the moon.
• February 5 - Apollo 14 lands on the Moon.
• February 9 - Apollo program: Apollo 14 returns to Earth after the third manned moon landing.
• May 19 - Mars probe program: Mars 2 is launched by the Soviet Union.
• May 30 - Mariner program: Mariner 9 is launched toward Mars.
• June 30 - The crew of the Soyuz 11 spacecraft are killed when their air supply leaks out through a faulty valve during re-entry preparations, the only human deaths to occur outside Earth's atmosphere.
• July 26 - Apollo program: Launch of Apollo 15. On July 31 the Apollo 15 astronauts become the first to ride in a lunar rover a day after landing on the surface.
• November 13 - Mariner program: Mariner 9 enters Mars orbit.

Biology

• Francis G. Howarth discovers communities of specialized thermophile cave animals living in lava tubes at Hawaii Volcanoes National Park.

Computer science

• July 4 - Michael S. Hart posts the first e-book, a copy of the United States Declaration of Independence, on the University of Illinois at Urbana–Champaign's mainframe computer, the origin of Project Gutenberg.^[1]
• November 3 - The UNIX Programmer's Manual is published.
• November 15 - Intel release the world's first microprocessor, the 4004.
• end - Ray Tomlinson sends the first ARPAnet e-mail between host computers, at BBN, Cambridge, Massachusetts, with the first use of the @ sign in an address.^[2]

Mathematics

• Daniel Quillen publishes a proof of the Adams conjecture.^[3]

Medicine

• Boston Women's Health Book Collective publishes Our Bodies, Ourselves in the U.S.
• E. G. L. Bywaters characterises adult-onset Still's disease, a rare form of inflammatory arthritis.^[4]

Psychology

• August 14–20 - Stanford prison experiment.
• Studies in Animal and Human Behavior, Volume II is published by Konrad Lorenz.

Awards

• Nobel Prizes
  • Physics - Dennis Gabor
  • Chemistry - Gerhard Herzberg
  • Medicine - Earl W Sutherland, Jr
• Turing Award - John McCarthy

Births

• August 2 - Ruth Lawrence, English-born mathematician.

Deaths

• March 11 - Philo T. Farnsworth (b. 1906), American television pioneer.
• April 1 - Dame Kathleen Lonsdale (b. 1903), Irish-born crystallographer.
• June 30 - Soviet cosmonauts
  • Georgy Dobrovolsky (b. 1928)
  • Vladislav Volkov (b. 1935)
  • Viktor Patsayev (b. 1933)

References