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Pro-Soviet government falls in Ethiopia

End of the First Gulf War

Germany is reunified. On October 3, 1990, East and West Germany are reunified after 45 years of the Cold War. At the end of World War II, the country had been divided between the four main Allied powers: the Soviet Union, the United States, Great

German Unification: Germany is united again

Gorbachev receives the Nobel Peace Prize

The Ulysses probe is launched by the Space Shuttle Discovery (STS-41). Two years later, it will pass near Jupiter for a flyby that will place it into an orbit inclined 80 degrees to the ecliptic. It will observe the solar poles three times (1994-95, 2000-01,

statistical-mathematical question appears in the pages of the American magazine Parade (a Sunday column appearing in over 700 American publications). It’s based on an old show from the 1960s: “Let’s Make a Deal.” It’s the famous Monty Hall Problem: you’re faced with three doors: behind

Estonia, following Lithuania, also declares its independence from the Soviet Union. The collapse of the USSR, which no one expected or predicted, is still several months away.

Chile. Patricio Aylwin is the first democratically elected president since Pinochet. The center-left Concertacion alliance will also win the next four elections (1990, 1993, 2000, 2006). The presidents will be the Christian Democrats Patricio Aylwin and Eduardo Frei Jr. (son of the previous president Eduardo

Lithuania proclaims independence. Lithuania is the first Soviet republic to proclaim its independence. In the Middle Ages, the state was one of the largest in Europe, stretching from the Baltic to the Black Sea. In 1795, it was annexed by Russia. After a brief period

The Sandinistas voluntarily resign from power. Violeta Chamorro is elected president of Nicaragua.

Scottish writer Iain M. Banks publishes “Use Of Weapons”, later published in Italy as “The War of Zakalwe”, part of the Culture saga

The Chrysler M1-Abrams heavy tank, in the M1A2 version, is equipped with a periscope with an infrared camera, new navigation instruments, and a sophisticated integrated architecture with interface and datalink for battlefield surveillance.

After the Ottoman Empire, the Austro-Hungarian Empire, and the Third Reich, the last of the 20th century’s empires also collapsed: the Soviet Union.

Aung San Suu Kyi, daughter of a leader of the anti-Japanese resistance during World War II, is imprisoned during demonstrations raging in Burma

Anton Zeilinger and Danny Greenberger begin to think about the entanglement of more than two particles, they talk about GHZ entangled state (Greenberger-Horne-Zeilinger) which immediately reveals the quantum nature of the entangled state, inexplicable with normal statistics or with unknown hidden variables.

Chinese suppression of the uprising in Tibet

George Bush sends National Security Advisor Brent Scowcroft and Deputy Secretary of State Lawrence Eagleburger to Beijing on a top-secret mission. Only a few weeks have passed since the Tiananmen Square massacre. They arrive in China on an unmarked military C-141. An attempt is made

Several Soviet-backed regimes collapsed after the withdrawal of many Cuban military advisors and troops: Benin, Congo, Ethiopia, Angola

The American probe Voyager 2 begins observing Neptune and its moons, completing its mission only in October of the same year. This is the sixth and final planetary encounter of the Voyager program. Voyager 2’s arrival at Neptune makes history: to date, Neptune, like Uranus,

China. Student protests, which later escalated into the Tiananmen Square massacre, spread to 341 cities across the vast country.

Estonia and Lithuania, bravely, with the USSR and the Berlin Wall still standing, Tiananmen still to come, declare independence from Moscow.

Budapest. The Hungarian communists decide, on their own, to open their border with Austria. The Iron Curtain begins to crumble spontaneously. The world is stunned. Around 15,000 East Germans set off on a “vacation in Hungary,” in reality a one-way trip to the West.

One million people gathered in Tiananmen Square to demand greater freedom (the largest demonstration in a communist country).

US-Libyan air battle in the Gulf of Sidra

The number of known asteroids has risen to 10,000. There were 1,000 in 1921. In 2020, there will be 853,561.

Japanese Emperor Hiroito dies

The Pan Am jumbo plane explodes over Lockerbie, Scotland, killing 273. The attackers were found ten years later: they were Libyans.

The F117 Stealth is presented to the public (11 years after the start of series production)

Seoul Olympics

French scientist Jacques Benveniste publishes a study in the journal Nature in which he believes that homeopathy elicits a reaction in certain blood cells. However, the study’s results prove unsuccessful in other laboratories. James Randi, a renowned illusionist and fraud debunker, then visits his Paris

41.4% of the world’s population lives in democracies. And 80% of those who don’t live in democracies are Chinese. By 2016, the population living in democracies will rise to 56%.

First launch of an Ariane IV (ESA)

The first instance of the mega-trial against the Mafia concludes, with 19 life sentences and prison sentences totaling 2,665 years. The third instance, which upholds almost all the sentences, concludes on January 30, 1992. It is the largest criminal trial ever held in the world.

Ahmed Yassin founds the Islamic fundamentalist movement Hamas (“Ardor”) in the Gaza Strip

Financial crash on Wall Street followed by other world stock markets (the NASDAQ lost 11% on October 19 and 9% on October 20)

Weiskrantz discovers that the visual cortex (located in the occipital part – back – of the encephalon – brain -) is not the only region responsible for vision: there are other small areas that allow the patient to conjecture what he is seeing.

Montreal Treaty on the Reduction of Ozone-Depleting CFC Gases

Berlin. Ronald Reagan delivers his famous speech at the Brandenburg Gate in West Berlin: “Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall!”

German pilot Mathias Rust, 19, flew his Cessna 172B from Hamburg, via Helsinki, to Moscow’s Red Square in front of the Kremlin without being detected by Soviet air defense systems. He paid the price with 432 days in prison in Lubyanka, the KGB headquarters.

The powerful Soviet booster Energia successfully completes its first launch. Its payload, a military anti-satellite satellite, fails to reach orbit, but the problem isn’t the Energia’s fault. During launch, the Energia tilts dangerously, but the launch is successful, albeit with a completely destroyed launch pad.

Lyon, France. The trial of Nazi Klaus Barbie is underway. He will be sentenced to life imprisonment.

US Secretary of State George Schultz meets with Gorbachev in Moscow to discuss arms reduction

In 1987, the Soviet Space Program employed 400,000 people. The Baikonur, Plesetsk, and Kapustin Yar cosmodromes launched around a hundred satellites a year. There were missions for spy and communications satellites (Molniya), weather (Meteor), television (Raduga, Gorizont, Ekran), for experiments on animals (Bion), and for

The Kvant I module is added to the Mir space station.

Angela Olinto studies the collapse of a neutron star into a strange star (i.e. composed of “strange” quarks that are the result of the decay of an “up” quark into a “strange” quark, a positron and a neutrino, or of a “down” quark directly into

Mikhail Gorbachev orders the release of dissident Andrei Sakharov

US-USSR Summit in Reykjavik, Iceland

Indian-American physicist Abhay Ashtekar makes a major step forward in his attempt to quantize General Relativity by reducing the constraints to polynomial form, thereby dramatically simplifying the equations.

The European probe Giotto passes just 600 km from Halley’s Comet, at a staggering 68 km/sec. It manages to photograph the comet’s dark nucleus in incredible detail. It is also struck by two cometary grain impacts (likely much smaller than a millimeter, and weighing less

The Japanese Sakigake (pioneer) probe passes within 7 million km of Halley’s Comet, thus managing to observe its entire tail.

Cisco Systems is born

NEC produces the first portable computer with a Liquid Crystal Display (LCD)

National Instruments releases Lab View 1.0

California. For SIGGRAPH, Jobs and Catmull of Pixar decide to have Lasseter produce a new short, and he decides to animate the Luxo lamp he keeps on his desk. It will become the company’s symbol.

California. After discussions with George Lucas at his Skywalker Ranch, Steve Jobs offers to buy Lucas Film’s Computer Division. This is Jobs’s dream of combining art and technology. The deal calls for Jobs to buy 70% of the company for $10 million, with the remainder

Whittington lists 22 species of Burgess shales in his category of organisms not placed in any Phylum or class of Arthropoda

Artificial Intelligence (AI): Yann Le Cun invents Convolutional Neural Networks (CNN, Krizhevky et al.)

The F22 Raptor is conceived

New York. Columbia University definitively sells the land on which the complex stands to the Rockefeller Group for $400 million. It was initially sold in 1928 to John D. Rockefeller Jr. under an 87-year lease.

Gulf Oil Corporation (GOC) merges with Standard Oil of California (SOCAL), acquiring the Chevron name.

An accident at reactor number one in Balakovo, on the Volga River 250 km southwest of Samara, causes a release of 500-degree steam, killing 14 people. Despite the accident, the officer in charge, Viktor Bryukhanov, is promoted to supervisor of reactor construction at Chernobyl.

String theory is developed in the context of SuperSymmetry: space has 10 or 26 dimensions, all but 3 rolled up into an extremely small space.

The Soviets complete the automated system called Perimeter or Dead Hand, a network of sensors and computers that can automatically order a retaliatory nuclear strike against the United States with ICBMs. The USSR, with its highly hierarchical and vertical structure, is well-suited to managing secrecy

A US retaliatory operation aimed at killing the leader of Hizbullah (or Hezbollah) fails, accidentally killing 80 people in Beirut.

The US Navy uses ELF (Extremely Low Frequency) standing waves to penetrate deep into the oceans, maintaining radio contact with nuclear submarines even without surfacing. To do this, it operates stations at Clam Lake, Wisconsin, and Republic, Michigan, with 28-mile-long (46 km) underground antennas. The

‘Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom’, directed by Steven Spielberg, a LucasFilm production, is coming out in theaters.

Apple launches Mac Intosh on the market, the first personal computer that uses a graphical interface and a mouse. Mac Intosh is a type of Californian apple.

Alexander Vilenkin, a Soviet Jewish scientist who later fled to the United States at Tufts University, proposed the theory of eternal inflation. While studying physics at the University of Kharkiv, Vilenkin refused an offer of employment from the KGB, ultimately being barred from pursuing a

President Reagan, speaking in Tokyo, declared: “A nuclear war can never be won and should never be fought; the only reason to possess nuclear weapons is to make sure they are never used.”

Sally Ride is the first American astronaut. She goes into space on the Space Shuttle Challenger, mission STS-7.

Pioneer 10 was the first human-made object to pass the orbit of Neptune (which at the time was further out than Pluto), leaving behind the last planet in the Solar System, and headed toward Aldebaran in Taurus, which it would reach in another 2 million

Boeing makes first F-18 Hornet operational

Holy Year of Redemption celebrated by John Paul II

Leonid Brezhnev dies, Yuri Andropov succeeds him

Iran. Former Iranian Foreign Minister Sadegh Ghotbzadeh is executed by an Iranian firing squad on charges of making deals with the West.

South Atlantic. The first wave of British Victor tankers deploys to the equatorial island of Ascension Island, in preparation for Operation Black Duck 1, to be carried out on 30 April. Operations Black Buck 1 to Black Buck 7 were seven very long-range air raids

The Poincaré Conjecture for 4-dimensional spheres is proved by Michael Freedman of the University of California, San Diego. He does so by classifying every compact, simply connected 4-dimensional manifold.

Venera 14 lands on Venus and transmits 57 minutes of additional color panoramic images and soil analysis

The Chamber of Deputies approves the law decreeing the dissolution of Licio Gelli’s P2 Masonic lodge.