1983 in science

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The year 1983 in science and technology involved many significant events, as listed below.

Anthropology

• New Zealand anthropologist Derek Freeman publishes Margaret Mead and Samoa: The Making and Unmaking of an Anthropological Myth, critical of Coming of Age in Samoa (1928) by Margaret Mead (d. 1978).

Astronomy and space science

• June 13 – Pioneer 10 passes the orbit of Neptune, becoming the first man-made object to travel beyond the major planets of the solar system.
• September 26 – The Soyuz T-10-1 mission ends in a pad abort at the Baikonur Cosmodrome, when a pad fire occurs at the base of the Soyuz U rocket during the launch countdown. The escape tower system, attached to the top of the capsule containing the crew and Soyuz spacecraft, fires immediately pulling the crew safe from the vehicle, a few seconds before the rocket explodes, destroying the launch complex.

Biology

• April – Kary Mullis discovers polymerase chain reaction.
• May 20 – First reports of HIV as a possible cause of AIDS, by independent virology teams led by Luc Montagnier and Robert Gallo.
• June – First report of using a monoclonal antibody as a medical test.
• July – Determination of the first sequences of type I and type II keratins and prediction of the α-helical domain structure of intermediate filament proteins.

Computer science

• January 1 – The ARPANET officially changes to use the Internet Protocol, creating the Internet.
• August – MIDI 1.0 specification for a Musical Instrument Digital Interface (originally devised by Dave Smith of Sequential Circuits) published.
• September 27 – Richard Stallman announces the GNU Project.
• November 10 – Fred Cohen demonstrates a self-replicating source code which his academic adviser at the University of Southern California, Leonard Adleman, likens to a virus.
• December – Yugoslav popular science magazine Galaksija releases a special (January 1984) issue, Računari u vašoj kući, with complete instructions on how to build a full-featured home computer, Galaksija.
• The US Federal Government standardizes Ada (programming language), a strongly typed, comb-structured computer language, with exception handlers, for general-purpose programming.
• Word processor software Multi-Tool Word, soon to become Microsoft Word, is released. Free demonstration copies on disk are distributed with the November issue of PC World magazine.

History of science

• Keith Thomas publishes Man and the Natural World: changing attitudes in England, 1500–1800.

Mathematics

• Daniel Gorenstein (with Richard Lyons) proves the trichotomy theorem for finite simple groups of characteristic 2 type and rank at least 4, and announces that proof of the classification of finite simple groups is complete (although that for quasithin groups has not been demonstrated at this time).

Metrology

• October 21 – At the seventeenth General Conference on Weights and Measures, the length of a metre is redefined as the distance light travels in vacuum in 1/299,792,458 of a second.

Psychology

• Howard Gardner's book Frames of Mind presents his theory of multiple intelligences.

Organizations

• Spain re-joins CERN after having left in 1969 (originally joined for the first time in 1961).

Awards

• Nobel Prizes
  • Physics – Subrahmanyan Chandrasekhar, William Alfred Fowler
  • Chemistry – Henry Taube
  • Medicine – Barbara McClintock
• Turing Award – Ken Thompson, Dennis Ritchie

Deaths

• February 27 – Nikolai Aleksandrovich Kozyrev, Russian astronomer and astrophysicist (b. 1908)
• March 18 – Ivan Vinogradov, Russian mathematician (b. 1891)
• May 22 – Albert Claude, Belgian biologist, co-recipient of the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine in 1974 (b. 1898)
• August 2 – Edmund Jaeger, American naturalist (b. 1887)
• October 26 – Alfred Tarski, Polish American logician and mathematician (b. 1901)
• December 6 - Bruce Irons, engineer and mathematician (b. 1924; suicide)