The year 1974 in science and technology involved some significant events, listed below.

Astronomy and space exploration

• February 8 - After 84 days in space, the last crew of the temporary American space station Skylab return to Earth.
• Hawking radiation is predicted by Stephen Hawking.^[1]

Engineering

• Stephen Salter invents the "Salter Duck", a wave energy converter.

History of science

• F. W. Winterbotham publishes The Ultra secret: the inside story of Operation Ultra, Bletchley Park and Enigma, the first popular account of cryptography carried out at Bletchley Park during World War II.

Medicine

• Identification of controlled trials in perinatal medicine, as advocated by Archie Cochrane, begins in Cardiff, Wales.^[2]
• Henry Heimlich describes the "Heimlich Maneuver" as a treatment for choking.^[3]

Physics

• May 18 - "Smiling Buddha", India's first nuclear test explosion takes place underground at Pokhran.^[4]
• "November Revolution": J/ meson, the first particle found to contain a charm quark, discovered by teams at the Brookhaven National Laboratory, led by Samuel Ting,^[5] and at the Stanford Linear Accelerator Center, led by Burton Richter.^[6]

Psychology

• Civilized Man's Eight Deadly Sins is published by Konrad Lorenz.
• Leon Kamin demonstrates that Sir Cyril Burt's influential research into heritability of IQ using twin studies shows evidence of statistical falsification.^[7]

Other events

• Rubik's Cube invented by Ern Rubik.^[8]

Awards

• Fields Prize in Mathematics: Enrico Bombieri and David Mumford
• Nobel Prizes
  • Physics - Martin Ryle, Antony Hewish
  • Chemistry - Paul J. Flory
  • Medicine - Albert Claude, Christian de Duve, George Emil Palade
• Turing Award - Donald Knuth

Births

Deaths

• February 4 - S. N. Bose, Indian physicist (b. 1894)
• May 4 - Ludwig Koch, German-born British animal sound recordist (b. 1881)
• May 18 - Harry Ricardo, English mechanical engineer (b. 1885)
• August 22 - Jacob Bronowski, Polish-born British scientific polymath (b. 1908)

References

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