1970 in science

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The year 1970 in science and technology involved some significant events, listed below.

Astronomy and space exploration

• February 11 – Japan becomes the fourth country to launch a satellite into orbit.
• March 31 – Explorer I reentry (after 12 years in orbit)
• April 11 – Apollo 13 ill-fated space mission launched
• April 17 – Apollo 13 returns safely to earth
• August 17 – Venera program: Venera 7 is launched. It will later becomes the first spacecraft to successfully transmit data from another planet.
• November 17 – Luna program: The Soviet Union lands Lunokhod 1 on Mare Imbrium (Sea of Rains) on the Moon. This is the first roving remote-controlled robot to land on another world and was released by the orbiting Luna 17 spacecraft.

Biology

• Establishment of Parc naturel régional de Camargue in the south of France.

Computer science

• January 1 – Unix time begins at 00:00:00 UTC.
• November 17 – Douglas Engelbart receives a United States patent for the first computer mouse.
• Xerox PARC computer laboratory opens in Palo Alto, California.

Earth sciences

• January 4 – 1970 Tonghai earthquake: An earthquake of 7.7 Richter magnitude scale occurs in Tonghai County, Yunnan province, China, on the Red River fault.

Mathematics

• Conway's Game of Life cellular automaton devised by John Horton Conway.
• Mathematician Kurt Gödel allows circulation of his ontological proof of the existence of God.

Physics

• Prediction of the GIM mechanism, requiring the existence of a charm quark, by Sheldon Glashow, John Iliopoulos and Luciano Maiani.

Psychology

• Henri Tajfel develops his minimal group paradigm, a constituent of social identity theory.
• Studies in Animal and Human Behavior, Volume I is published by Konrad Lorenz.

Awards

• Fields Prize in Mathematics: Alan Baker, Heisuke Hironaka, Sergei Novikov and John Griggs Thompson
• Nobel Prizes
  • Physics – Hannes Alfvén, Louis Néel
  • Chemistry – Luis F. Leloir
  • Medicine – Bernard Katz, Ulf von Euler, Julius Axelrod
• Turing Award – James H. Wilkinson

Births

• Eleanor Maguire, Irish-born neuropsychologist.

Deaths

• January 5 – Max Born (b. 1882), German physicist and recipient of the Nobel Prize in physics in 1954.
• July 20 – Margaret Reed Lewis (b. 1881), American cell biologist.
• August 1 – Otto Heinrich Warburg (b. 1883), German physiologist and winner of the 1931 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine.