1971 in science explained

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 crewed 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 Moon's surface.
• November 13 – Mariner program: Mariner 9 enters Mars orbit.

Biology

• July – Francis G. Howarth discovers communities of specialized thermophile cave animals living in lava tubes at Hawaii Volcanoes National Park.^[1]
• C. A. W. Jeekel publishes Nomenclator Generum et Familiarum Diplopodorum.
• John O'Keefe discovers place cells in the mammalian brain.^{[2] [3]}

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.^[4]
• November 3 – The Unix Programmer's Manual is published.
• November 15 – Intel release the world's first microprocessor, the 4004.
• November/December – Computer Space is released, the first arcade video game.
• 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.^[5]
• Kenbak-1 goes on sale, considered to be the world's first personal computer by the Computer History Museum and the American Computer Museum.
• The earliest floppy disks, 8 inches in diameter, become commercially available as components of products shipped by IBM, their inventor.

Conservation

• February 2 – The international Ramsar Convention for the conservation and sustainable utilization of wetlands is signed in Ramsar, Mazandaran, Iran.

Earth sciences

• February 9 – The San Fernando (Sylmar) earthquake occurs in southern California with a magnitude of 6.6 and a perceived intensity of XI (extreme) on the Modified Mercalli intensity scale.

Mathematics

• Stephen Cook introduces the concept of NP-completeness in computational complexity theory at the 3rd Annual ACM Symposium on Theory of Computing.^[6]
• Daniel Quillen publishes a proof of the Adams conjecture.^[7]
• Steven Takiff introduces Takiff algebras.^[8]
• The Quine–Putnam indispensability argument is first presented explicitly, by Hilary Putnam in his book Philosophy of Logic.

Medicine

• October 1 – Godfrey Hounsfield's invention, X-ray computed tomography, is first used on a patient with a cerebral cyst at Atkinson Morley Hospital in Wimbledon, London.^[9]
• 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.^[10]
• Smallpox is eradicated from the Americas.^[11]

Paleontology

• August 3 – The Fighting Dinosaurs, a fossil specimen featuring a Velociraptor and a Protoceratops in combat, is first located in the Late Cretaceous Djadochta Formation of Mongolia by a Polish-Mongolian team.^[12]

Physics

• Roger Penrose proposes the Penrose process.^[13]

Psychology

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

Technology

• Richard H. Frenkiel, Joel S. Engel and Philip T. Porter of Bell Labs in the United States set out the parameters for a practical cellular telephone network.
• J. J. Stiffler publishes his book Theory of Synchronous Communications and edits a special issue of IEEE Transactions on Communication Technology on error correction codes.

Institutions

• Paris Descartes University begins to function in continuation of the medical department of the University of Paris.

Awards

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

Births

• May 29 – Howard Gobioff (d. 2008), American computer scientist.
• June 28 – Elon Musk, South African-born Canadian-American entrepreneur, engineer, inventor and investor.
• July 4 – Sivakumar Veerasamy, Indian plant geneticist.
• July 21 – Sara Seager, Canadian-American astrophysicist.
• August 2 – Ruth Lawrence, English-born mathematician.

Deaths

• January 23 – Fritz Feigl (b. 1891), Austrian-born Brazilian chemist
• January 25 – Donald Winnicott (b. 1896), English child psychiatrist.
• February 16 – Heinrich Willi (b. 1900), Swiss pediatrician.
• February 25 – Theodor Svedberg (b. 1884), Swedish chemist, Nobel Prize laureate
• March 11 – Philo T. Farnsworth (b. 1906), American television pioneer.
• April 1 – Dame Kathleen Lonsdale (b. 1903), Irish-born crystallographer.
• April 6 – Margaret Newton (b. 1887), Canadian plant pathologist.
• April 12 – Igor Tamm (b. 1895), Russian physicist, Nobel Prize laureate
• June 6 – Edward Andrade (b. 1887), English physicist.
• June 30 – Soviet cosmonauts
  • Georgy Dobrovolsky (b. 1928)
  • Vladislav Volkov (b. 1935)
  • Viktor Patsayev (b. 1933)
• September 15 – Benno Mengele (b. 1898), Austrian electrical engineer

Notes and References

1. Cavernicoles in Lava Tubes on the Island of Hawaii. Francis G.. Howarth. Science. 175. 4019. 1972-01-21. 325–326. 1733505. 10.1126/science.175.4019.325. 17814543. 1972Sci...175..325H. 36219772 .
2. O'Keefe. John. Dostrovsky. Jonathan. 1971. The hippocampus as a spatial map: preliminary evidence from unit activity in the freely-moving rat. Brain Research. 34. 1. 171–175. 10.1016/0006-8993(71)90358-1. 5124915.
3. Book: Binder, Marc D. Encyclopedia of Neuroscience. limited. 2009. Springer. 978-3-540-23735-8. 3166.
4. Web site: The History and Philosophy of Project Gutenberg. Project Gutenberg. Michael. Hart. August 1992. 2011-10-05. .
5. Web site: Ray . Tomlinson . The First Network Email . 2011-10-05 . dead . https://web.archive.org/web/20060506003539/http://openmap.bbn.com/~tomlinso/ray/firstemailframe.html . 2006-05-06 .
6. Book: Cook, Stephen. 1971. The complexity of theorem proving procedures. http://portal.acm.org/citation.cfm?coll=GUIDE&dl=GUIDE&id=805047. Proceedings of the Third Annual ACM Symposium on Theory of Computing. 151–158. 10.1145/800157.805047 . 9781450374644 . 7573663 .
7. Quillen. Daniel. The Adams Conjecture. 10.1016/0040-9383(71)90018-8. 0279804. 1971. Topology. 0040-9383. 10. 67–80. free.
8. Steven Takiff. Takiff. S. J.. Rings of invariant polynomials for a class of Lie algebras. 1995803. 10.2307/1995803. 0281839. 1971. Transactions of the American Mathematical Society. 0002-9947. 160. 249–262. free.
9. Beckmann. E. C.. CT scanning: the early days. 10.1259/bjr/29444122. British Journal of Radiology. 79. 937. 5–8. 2006. 16421398.
10. Bywaters. E. G. L.. Still's disease in the adult. Annals of the Rheumatic Diseases. 30. 2. 121–33. March 1971. 5315135. 1005739. 10.1136/ard.30.2.121.
11. News: Americas region is declared the world's first to eliminate rubella. WHO. 2015-04-30. 2015-04-30. dead. https://web.archive.org/web/20150518102827/http://www.paho.org/hq/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=10798%3Aamericas-free-of-rubella&catid=740%3Anews-press-releases&Itemid=1926&lang=en. 2015-05-18.
12. Kielan-Jaworowska. Z.. Barsbold. R.. 1972. Narrative of the Polish-Mongolian Palaeontological Expeditions, 1967-1971. Palaeontologia Polonica. 27. 1−12. https://web.archive.org/web/20240520234553/http://www.palaeontologia.pan.pl/Archive/1972-27_5-13_1-2.pdf. 2024-05-20. dead.
13. R.. Penrose. R. M.. Floyd. Extraction of Rotational Energy from a Black Hole. Nature Physical Science. 229. 6. 177. 1971. 10.1038/physci229177a0. 1971NPhS..229..177P.