The year 1973 in science and technology involved one significant event, listed below.
Astronomy and space exploration
March 7 – Comet Kohoutek is discovered
April 6 – Launch of Pioneer 11 spacecraft
May 14 – Skylab, the United States' first space station, is launched.
Solar eclipse of June 30, 1973 – Very long total solar eclipse visible in NE South America, the Atlantic, and central Africa. During the entire Second Millennium, only seven total solar eclipses exceed seven minutes of totality; this is the last. Observers aboard a Concorde jet are able to stretch totality to about 74 minutes by flying along the path of the moon's umbra.
July 25 – Soviet Mars 5 space probe launched.
November 3 – Mariner program: NASA launches the Mariner 10 toward Mercury (on March 29, 1974, it became the first space probe to reach that planet).
December 3 – Pioneer program: Pioneer 10 sends back the first close-up images of Jupiter.
December 7 – The "Big Ear" at the Ohio State University Radio Observatory begins a full-time search for extraterrestrial intelligence (SETI) radio survey, running continuously until 1995.
December 28 – Endangered Species Act signed into law in the United States.
Waldo R. Tobler introduces the Tobler hyperelliptical projection.
A successful method of Vitamin B12 total synthesis is reported by the groups of Robert Burns Woodward and Albert Eschenmoser.
November 21 – The sci-fi movie Westworld is the first feature film to use digital image processing.
October – Asymmetric key algorithms for public-key cryptography developed by James H. Ellis, Clifford Cocks and Malcolm J. Williamson at the United Kingdom Government Communications Headquarters.
Derek Ager publishes The Nature of the Stratigraphical Record.
May 5 – July 28 – BBC Television series The Ascent of Man, written and presented by Jacob Bronowski, first airs; there is also an accompanying bestselling book.
Fischer Black and Myron Scholes first articulate the Black–Scholes mathematical model of a financial market containing certain derivative investment instruments.
Physiology and medicine
The term "dendritic cell" is coined by Ralph M. Steinman working with Zanvil A. Cohn.
The term "Norrmalmstorgssyndromet", translated as Stockholm syndrome, is coined by Nils Bejerot.
David Rosenhan publishes the results of his experiment into the validity of psychiatric diagnosis.
The American Psychiatric Association officially declares that homosexuality is not a mental disorder.
April 3 – The first handheld mobile phone call is made by Martin Cooper of Motorola in New York City.
Ichiro Kato, Waseda University, develops the world's first full-scale humanoid robot, Wabot-1.
March 6 – The Montenegrin Academy of Sciences and Arts, founded as the Montenegrin Society for Science and Arts (Crnogorsko društvo za nauku i umjetnost), elects its first members.
Nobel Prizes
Physics – Leo Esaki, Ivar Giaever, Brian David Josephson
Chemistry – Ernst Otto Fischer, Geoffrey Wilkinson
Medicine – Karl Von Frisch, Konrad Lorenz, Nikolaas Tinbergen
Turing Award – Charles W. Bachman
October 5 – Cédric Villani, French mathematician
November 19 – Nim Chimpsky (d. 2000), chimpanzee
December 5 – Luboš Motl, Czech theoretical physicist
February 11 – J. Hans D. Jensen (b. 1907), German nuclear physicist
March 12 – David Lack (b. 1910), English ornithologist
March 14 – Howard H. Aiken (b. 1900), American computing pioneer
July 3 – Laurens Hammond (b. 1895), American inventor
December 10 – Wolf V. Vishniac (b. 1922), American microbiologist
December 17 – Charles Greeley Abbot (b. 1872), American astrophysicist
1973 in science Wikipedia (Text) CC BY-SA
