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The first 16 American Tomahawk missiles arrive in England

Rome. Attack on the Synagogue: two dark-skinned men threw grenades at families crowding outside and opened fire with machine guns. Thirty-nine people were injured, including three children. Stefano Gaj Tachè was killed.

Alan Guth proposes the theory of inflation which justifies several discrepancies in the Big Bang theory

‘Indiana Jones and the Raiders of the Lost Ark’, directed by Steven Spielberg, a LucasFilm production, is released in cinemas.

Very Large Array (VLA) radio telescope completed in San Augustine Plains (Socorro), NM

The first mass-produced F117 Stealth flies

Israeli F-16s bomb Iraqi nuclear power plant under construction in Osirak, near Baghdad

The quarter-century observation of the binary neutron star system PSR 1913+16 by Joseph Taylor and Russel Hulse leads to a confirmation of Einstein’s theory of General Relativity down to the fourteenth digit, a precision unmatched by any other scientific theory.

Carl Sagan founds the Planetary Society

United States. American Airlines Flight 191, a DC-10, literally loses an engine, crashes to the ground, killing all 271 people on board. One of McDonnell’s executives, hired directly by James “Old Mac” McDonnell, is Pete Conrad, the third man on the moon with Apollo 12.

Vietnam signs a treaty of friendship with the USSR that includes military provisions. A month later, Vietnam invades Cambodia.

The first four satellites of GPS Block I have been launched into orbit.

The first Boeing E-3 AWACS (Airborne Warning and Control Systems) enters service.

Nobel Prize-winning economists Gary Becker and George Stigler of the Chicago School of Economics published the paper “De Gustibus Non Est Disputandum,” in which they argue that economists should avoid meddling in the underpinnings of popular tastes. Preferences are part of who we are. Period.

11th National Congress of the Communist Party of China. Deng Xiaoping comes to power. Market reforms are initiated.

Viking 1 Arrives on Martian Soil: Chryse Planitia

The first Illyushin 76 cargo aircraft (40t load) is put into operation

Of the 118 members of Von Braun’s team, only 8 are still NASA employees.

Asteroid 2062 Aten, approximately 1.3 kilometers in size, is discovered in the asteroid belt. It is a NEO (Near Earth Object) that will give its name to an entire class of NEOs: the Aten asteroids, with perihelions well inside Earth’s orbit. If they come close

Vietnam. Saigon falls. The American embassy staff is evacuated. Communist troops occupy the capital.

Lisbon grants independence to Mozambique

Socialist revolution in Ethiopia; Haile Selasse is assassinated and his empire in Ethiopia disappears. Beginning of the Menghitsu dictatorship.

Oxford: Stephen Hawking claims that black holes aren’t so black after all: they have not only mass, momentum, and a magnetic field, but also temperature, entropy, and emit radiation; they can eventually evaporate and explode.

Soviet Union. Solzhenitsyn decides the time has come to publish The Gulag Archipelago. A few months earlier, the KGB had obtained copies of Alexander Solzhenitsyn’s book following the interrogation of one of the typists who had assisted the writer. The woman committed suicide out of

In Guam a Japanese soldier is found still faithful to the emperor’s orders to hold the positions

United States. Paul Elrich and John Holdren, in the journal Science, propose a model that directly links population size to environmental impact. The model will lead to the urgent need for action, along various lines, called CRIB: Consume Less, Recycle, Impose Limits, Back to the

Nikita Sergeevich Khrushchev dies in his dacha not far from Moscow, dictating his memoirs into a tape recorder

Paleontologist Robert T. Bakker publishes a paper suggesting that Triceratops was not a giant crawling lizard but an agile dinosaur that could also run (i.e., at least for one instant in its locomotor cycle, all four legs were raised off the ground).

First day of trading on the National Association of Securities Dealers Automated Quotation (NASDAQ)

Oregon Research Institute. Eugene, Oregon. Behavioral scientists Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky are having their most productive period.

Egypt: Completion of the Aswan Dam

Chicken meat is becoming a staple food for the average Western family. Until the 1960s, it was a luxury meat. Ninety-eight percent of chickens are from just three crosses developed (crossbred) by American companies. Half are Cobb 500.

Terrorism deaths worldwide are consistently below 0.2 per 100,000 people per year (0.0002%/year), with peaks of 0.2 in 1984 and 1997. In 2001 there is a peak of 0.1 worldwide, which is 1.0 for the United States alone (0.001%/year) due to the attacks on the

11:34 PM Italian time: Armstrong docks the LM with Collins’ CM.

7:54 PM Italian time (mission time 5d:04h:22′:00s): The LM lifts off from the lunar surface. Liftoff, powered by a single engine, is initially tragically risky, as the button to ignite the engine is missing (perhaps having been knocked and broken earlier). Buzz Aldrin has the

Tranquility Base, Sea of Tranquility, Moon. Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin collect, among many other rock samples, (Fe2+, Mg)Ti2O5 on the lunar surface. The mineral, previously unknown, will be named Armalcolite, after the initials of Armstrong, Aldrin, and Collins (who was in orbit in the

The New York Times publishes a “Correction” to its 1920 article ridiculing Robert Goddard and his experiments with liquid-fueled rockets aimed at deep space. At the time, the Times declared Goddard’s claim that his rocket could function in the vacuum of space ridiculous. In fact,

Apollo 11: Neil Armstrong, Michael Collins, and Edwin “Buzz” Aldrin make the first attempt to land on the Moon with the Command Module Columbia and the Lunar Module Eagle; they remain on the Moon for 21 hours and 36 minutes, walk on the Moon for

Venera 5 is crushed by Venus’ atmosphere at an altitude of 24 km.

A Horsefield Tortoise, along with flies and worms, becomes the first living thing to orbit the Moon. This was a Soviet launch.

The North Vietnamese surprise offensive begins during the Tet celebrations; General Giap and the American Westmoreland find themselves facing each other; thousands of North Vietnamese infiltrators attack strategic targets directly in South Vietnamese cities; it will take weeks to repel the attack and “clear” the

Korean Peninsula. Off North Korean waters, the American spy ship USS Pueblo (officially an environmental research vessel) is boarded by North Korean naval vessels, which board and seize the crew and vessel, including encryption devices given to their Soviet ally. The setback, however, will be

University of Michigan. Larry Roberts, appointed by Bob Taylor of the ARPA IPTO (Information Processing Techniques Office), presents a plan to connect several research centers using telephone lines. He proposes a centralized hub architecture and a decentralized web-based one. Roberts and Taylor will favor the

Lyndon Johnson confirmed at the White House

Modena. The central section of the Cialdini Barracks, the last bastion remaining from the ruins partially destroyed by American bombings during World War II, is demolished. Gypsy caravans gathered in front of it after the war, and there were jousts and shooting contests. After its

Texas Instruments has already supplied 100,000 integrated circuits to the Minuteman ICBM program.

Sergio Leone directs “A Fistful of Dollars” with Clint Eastwood, the first Spaghetti Western.

Indonesia. Sukarno declares himself president for life.

The Discoverer XXXVII mission (CORONA mission 9030) is the last publicly declared mission of this program, officially scientific in nature. In reality, they are CORONA spy satellites, which will continue until 1972 for a total of 142 missions, all classified simply as Air Force launches.

Bob Christiansen of the U.S. Geological Survey realizes that the entire Yellowstone National Park is the caldera (65 km in diameter!) of a volcano, which is fed by a superplume 200 km below, a magma chamber 72 km in diameter and 13 km thick; the

large impact structure was discovered in Yucatan; it was the 65-million-year-old Chixulub crater, but initially the discovery went completely unnoticed and was rediscovered in 1981 after the Alvarez family had already hypothesized a 65-million-year-old impact somewhere on Earth.

In Huntsville, Alabama, IBM finishes the first prototype of the Instrument Unit (IU), the inertial guidance system for the Saturn IB and Saturn V.

A Russian cosmonaut, at the end of a test lasting several hours in a sealed chamber with pure oxygen, inadvertently started a fire with a rag soaked in alcohol; during the 30 long minutes it took those outside to open the hatch, he suffered severe

Beginning of rafters’ exodus from Cuba to Florida

Murray Gell-Mann and Yuval Ne’eman understand the existence and nature of so-called quark multiplets

First successful recovery of the Soviet Vostok-2 spy satellite (1K-2 prototype). On board were the dogs Strelka and Belka. This occurred just 10 days after a similar American success with the recovery of the flag. Two days earlier, the Americans had managed to photograph and

There are 2000 computers in the USA

The first pacemaker is implanted in the chest at a Buffalo hospital.

Xerox introduces the first photocopier, invented by Charles Carlson

A series of radar pulses are launched towards Venus and their echoes are measured

The Soviets launch the Lunik 2 probe on a collision course with the Moon, where it crashes into Mare Imbrium. The probe also contains several spheres with Soviet flags and symbols. These are separated from the probe before impact and, using a rudimentary speed-reduction system

First US military advisors in Vietnam

Richard Feynman at Caltech gives his famous speech on nanotechnology in which he states: “There’s plenty of room at the bottom” and talks about the possibility of maneuvering things one atom at a time.

Japanese mathematician Yutaka Taniyama commits suicide

Construction of the Atomium in Brussels completed for the International Expo

Watson and Crick’s theoretical model was confirmed with one of the most beautiful experiments in biology: Matthew Meselson and Frank Stahl fed Escherichia coli heavy nitrogen (with an extra neutron) and discovered that its DNA became heavier than that of bacteria fed normal nitrogen. They

The Enrico Fermi Provincial Technical Institute was born in Modena, from a branch of the Corni Technical Institute, initially located in Via Barozzi

Nevada Range: Operation PlumbBob, nuclear detonation from a 230m “Laplace” balloon: the device weighs only 228kg and is the first prototype of a neutron bomb.

Hungary: After four days of violent and incessant fighting in the streets of Budapest, with citizens, mostly workers, armed men and Soviet armored troops opposing each other, the resistance ends; thousands of people have been arrested.

Robert Noyce, a 28-year-old PhD student at MIT, originally from Iowa, received a phone call: “Shockley here.” He would say a few years later: “It was like picking up the phone and talking to God.” Noyce was hired by Shockley. Along with chemist Gordon Moore

Linus Pauling awarded the Nobel Prize in Chemistry

The French surrender in Vietnam

The French asked Eisenhower for 20 B-26s and 400 technical specialists; the president would send half of them; then the French also asked for 2 or 3 atomic bombs, Ike replied “No.”

The American strategy in the event of a conflict with the USSR is outlined in the top-secret document NSC 162/2. It recognizes that the United States and its allies lack the conventional troops and weapons to contain a full-scale Red Army invasion of Western Europe.

Hugh Everett is admitted to the doctorate at Princeton University; he studies quantum mechanics as a student of Eugene Wigner and John Archibald Wheeler.

Ike Eisenhower (former Allied commander in chief at the Normandy landings) at the White House

The British militarily occupy the Suez Canal zone, after the failure of negotiations with the Egyptians

In March 1951, the Israeli government sent a request for $1.5 billion in compensation for the survivors and their heirs to the four powers occupying Germany and the two German governments. Neither the Soviet Union nor the German Democratic Republic ever responded to the request.

small test model of Alan Turing’s Automatic Computing Engine (ACE) runs its first program. It’s an electronic computer with a program stored on board. Turing was the first to draw up detailed specifications for such a machine, but, as a result, it was beaten by

Modena, Stadio Comunale. Modena soccer team faces league leaders Juventus (Parola’s team), three points behind. Modena wins 1-0. The lineups are: MODENA: Corghi, Remondini, Braglia; Malinverni, Neri, Stefanini; Romani, Brighenti, Bonci II, Cassani, Del Medico. JUVENTUS: Sentimenti IV; Vicich, Varglien; Depetrini, Parola, Locatelli; Sentimenti III,