1973 in science

The year 1973 in science and technology involved some significant events, 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 becomes the first space probe to reach that planet); it will be the first space flight to use gravity assist.
 * 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.

Biology

 * December 28 – Endangered Species Act signed into law in the United States.

Cartography

 * Waldo R. Tobler introduces the Tobler hyperelliptical projection.

Chemistry

 * A successful method of Vitamin B12 total synthesis is reported by the groups of Robert Burns Woodward and Albert Eschenmoser.
 * Akira Endo identifies the first statin, mevastatin.

Computer science

 * March 1 – Xerox PARC releases the Xerox Alto, the first computer designed to support an operating system based on a graphical user interface.
 * September – The TV Typewriter appears on the cover of Radio-Electronics. Designed by Don Lancaster, it is a video terminal that can display two pages of 16 lines of 32 upper case characters on a standard television set.
 * October – A form of the suffix automaton is introduced by Peter Weiner.
 * November 21 – The sci-fi movie Westworld is the first feature film to use digital image processing.

Cryptography

 * 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.

Earth sciences

 * Derek Ager publishes The Nature of the Stratigraphical Record.

History of science

 * 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.

Mathematics

 * Fischer Black and Myron Scholes first articulate the Black–Scholes mathematical model of a financial market containing certain derivative investment instruments.
 * Jürgen Stückrad and Wolfgang Vogel introduce the Buchsbaum ring.

Physiology and medicine

 * August – Production of monoclonal antibodies involving human–mouse hybrid cells is first described by Jerrold Schwaber.
 * 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.

Psychiatry

 * David Rosenhan publishes the results of his experiment into the validity of psychiatric diagnosis.
 * The American Psychiatric Association publishes the 1st edition of its Principles of Medical Ethics, incorporating the 'Goldwater rule' (that it is unethical for a psychiatrist to offer a professional opinion on an individual in the public eye without an examination and consent).
 * December 15 – The American Psychiatric Association removes the definition of homosexuality as a mental disorder from the 2nd edition of its Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM-II).

Technology

 * April 2 – The LexisNexis computerized legal research service begins.
 * April 3 – The first handheld mobile phone call is made by Martin Cooper of Motorola in New York City.
 * June 4 – A United States patent for the Docutel automated teller machine is granted to Donald Wetzel, Tom Barnes and George Chastain.
 * Ichiro Kato, Waseda University, develops the world's first full-scale humanoid robot, Wabot-1.

Institutions

 * 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.

Awards

 * 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

Births

 * May 19 – Alice Roberts, English evolutionary biologist, biological anthropologist and science and archaeology popularizer
 * October 5 – Cédric Villani, French mathematician and politician
 * November 19 – Nim Chimpsky (d. 2000), chimpanzee
 * December 5 – Luboš Motl, Czech theoretical physicist

Deaths

 * February 11 – J. Hans D. Jensen (b. 1907), German nuclear physicist
 * February 20 – Alf Lysholm (b. 1893), Swedish mechanical engineer.
 * March 12 – David Lack (b. 1910), English ornithologist
 * March 14 – Howard H. Aiken (b. 1900), American computing pioneer
 * March 28 – C. Doris Hellman (b. 1910), American historian of science
 * March 30 – William Justin Kroll (b. 1889), Luxembourgish metallurgist
 * May 21 – Grigore Moisil (b. 1906), Romanian mathematician, died in Canada
 * July 1 – Laurens Hammond (b. 1895), American inventor
 * August 9 – Preben von Magnus (b. 1912), Danish virologist
 * August 12 – Walter Rudolf Hess (b. 1881), Swiss physiologist, recipient of the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine
 * August 16 – Selman Waksman (b. 1888), Ukrainian-born Jewish-American biochemist and microbiologist
 * November 25 – Elisa Leonida Zamfirescu (b. 1887), Romanian engineer
 * December 10 – Wolf V. Vishniac (b. 1922), American microbiologist
 * December 17 – Charles Greeley Abbot (b. 1872), American astrophysicist