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During a conference in the Sala degli Stemmi of the Scuola Normale Superiore in Pisa, Palmiro Togliatti exchanges words with a student, Adriano Sofri, who accuses him of not doing what he promised. “You try to start a revolution,” Togliatti says. “I’ll try, I’ll try,”

Syria. A coup d’état ratifies Syria’s passage into the Soviet sphere. A process that had been underway since 1956.

The United States deploys Titan II ICBMs in underground silos, the first missiles ready to be launched at short notice; they are missiles with a 9Mton warhead deployed at 54 sites in Arkansas, Nebraska, and Arizona; they will be dismantled in 1987.

Paul VI (Giovanni Battista Montini) is Pope

Man on the Moon!

The nuclear reactor at the Italian power plant in Latina is turned on (the first)

Soviet and American high-altitude nuclear tests

Simon publishes The Architecture of Complexity in which he explains the reasons why complex organizations of any kind, biological or artificial, tend to self-organize into nested hierarchies of repeated sub-units.

A third Soviet Venera-Molniya mission fails to enter Earth orbit.

A second Soviet Venera-Molniya mission fails to enter Earth orbit.

Leon Lederman, Mel Schwartz, and Jack Steinberg discover the muon neutrino, the second form of neutrino (the third will be the tau neutrino).

Cyril Hazard observes an object in the constellation Virgo, 3C273, which will later be recognized as a quasar. It is 2 billion light-years from Earth and emits hundreds of times more light than any galaxy.

Beginning of US intervention in Vietnam

The USSR breaks its 34-month moratorium on nuclear testing and conducts the first of 57 Soviet tests in 1957.

First Mercury Missions (one man aboard)

Eugene Wigner suggests a new variant of the Copenhagen Interpretation that holds “consciousness” responsible for the emergence of the R (probabilistic) part of quantum mechanics: in the entire part of the universe where there are no conscious beings to observe, there is only a superposition

Rolf Landauer of IBM Thomas J. Watson Research Labs discovered that computers only need to dissipate heat when information is lost (for example, a NOT does not lose any, i.e., it is reversible, while an AND is not).

American Alan Shepard will be in space for a few minutes aboard Freedom 7, launched by a Mercury-Redstone rocket; his 2-ton probe will remain in space for 15 minutes before re-entering with a deceleration of 11g.

Erwin Schrödinger dies. He is buried in the cemetery of the beautiful Tyrolean village of Alpbach. The headstone bears his famous equation as its epitaph: ih dpsi/dt = H psi

Cuba signs the economic agreement with the Soviet Union that will determine its international relations for decades to come.

To carry out the first lunar missions with Ye-6 Luna unmanned landers, the 8K78 launcher (later Molniya) was developed. The first and second stages were designed by Glushko (OKN-453), the third by Kosberg (OKB-154), and the fourth by Korolev (OKB-1). In October 1960, two probes

ERMA (Electronic Recording Method of Accounting) replaces 2332 bookkeepers at Bank of America.

Theodore Mainan creates the first laser in the laboratory by “lasering” ruby

Englishman James Lovelock and American Lynn Margulis create the Gaia hypothesis: the Earth could function as a self-regulating living organism in symbiosis with real life

Physicist Hugh Everett (originator of the “Many World Interpretation” in Quantum Mechanics) contributes to the drafting of WSEG No. 50 i.e. the Weapon System Evaluation Group, a crucially important report still covered by military secrecy after 50 years

Philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre publishes Critique of Dialectical Reason. Sartre argues that human freedom is absolute but also disturbing.

Dr. Widukind Lens presents the case of malformed babies and blames Thalidomide. His judgment is considered exaggerated by most. But then the poor documentation provided by the supplier leads the American FDA to ban the drug from marketing in the US. Then Lenz demonstrates the

The Soviets launch the Lunik 3 probe toward the far side of the Moon. It will transmit the first, very grainy, images of the Moon’s far side. Twenty-nine photos are taken, 17 were successfully transmitted to Earth, and six were published by the Soviets. The

De Gaulle’s speech on Algeria’s right to self-determination

Antarctic Treaty

The first CH-47A Chinook twin-propeller transport helicopter is produced

Noyce of Fairchild develops an idea similar to that of Kilby of Texas Instruments. He calls it the Planar Process. It involves placing all the components on a single silicon chip. He also considers printing small copper tracks on top of the silicon oxide.

Langley, Virginia. NACA (National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics) employees are going to work as usual, but starting today they are working at NASA (National Aeronautics). and SpaceAdministration).

After the unexpected worldwide enthusiasm for Sputnik, the USSR approves an ambitious space program. Korolev learns that the lunar Pioneer will launch on August 17th and tries to beat it to the punch. He awaits its launch; the Pioneer explodes 77 seconds after launch, and

Britain conducts its last nuclear test; from then on it will only engage in operations in cooperation with the United States.

The Merlin law (the socialist Angelina Merlin) closes the brothels

NASA awards Rocketdyne the contract to build the Saturn I’s H1 engines.

Eniwetok Atoll, Operation HardTack I, “Oak” thermonuclear detonation from a 1.7m barge, 8.9Mton, creates an underwater crater 62m deep and 1750m wide; the test will be used to develop the W-53 warhead for Titan II missiles: the B-53 strategic bomb.

Data from the Explorer III and V satellites are used by James Van Allen to discover the Earth’s magnetosphere (Explorers II and IV explode at launch)

A team of Cambridge astronomers led by Martin Ryle shows that most radio sources must be located outside our galaxy.

Pioneer 4 was the first American mission to fly by the Moon; 18 other US and 10 Soviet missions followed before man arrived on the Moon with Apollo 11.

NASA is created: the space race begins

After the explosion of the US Navy’s Vanguard rocket on live television, Von Braun says to Neil McEnroy, future defense secretary: “When you get back to Washington you’ll find all hell broken loose. I wish you hold one thought in mind in all that noise

General Electric creates the first SCR (Silicon Controlled Rectifier): thyristors

Frank Rosenblatt of Cornell University, New York, invents the first neural network. After the first two AI winters, ANNs (Artificial Neural Networks) will make a difference in machine learning and deep learning in the early 21st century.

The Italian Communist Party Congress condemns the 101 members of the “Document of 101”, who are largely leaving the party.

“Document of 101” (mostly intellectuals close to the party) against the Italian Communist Party’s position on the Hungarian uprising

Nositel-1 (N-1, carrier) was first proposed by OKB-1 on September 14, 1956, as a general-purpose heavy-lift cargo carrier. This was to maintain military support. It was approved in 1960 and oriented for the Moon on July 27, 1963, but soon proved too small for a

Michael Ventris dies in tragic circumstances in a car accident. He had decoded Linear B a few years earlier: in 1953, he had given a public lecture on the decoding of the Linear B script found on clay tablets in Crete in 1900 inside the

USAF reaches Mach 3.2

The FIAT G-91 jet aircraft makes its maiden flight; it is one of the greatest successes of the Italian aeronautical industry.

John Archibald Wheeler takes his doctoral student Hugh Everett’s thesis, The theory of the Universal Wave Function, to Copenhagen to discuss it with Niels Bohr, who has a negative reaction.

74 Russians die in R-16 rocket fire, the greatest tragedy of the space race.

The Americans, through Dwight Eisenhower, forced the French, British, and Israelis to withdraw from the military operation in the Suez Canal so as not to push the Egyptians into Soviet arms. But Egypt would still fall into the Soviet orbit, along with Syria. The Soviets,

William Shockley, moves from New Jersey to Mountain View, California and founds a factory that produces transistors using common silicon, instead of expensive germanium.

West Germany. The Allied High Commission is dissolved and the Federal Republic of Germany becomes a sovereign state.

The United States began construction of a Distant Early Warning Line, to detect a possible Soviet attack via radar. There was a tremendous sense of urgency due to the likely outbreak of hostilities at any moment. A network of radars was thus built, continuously covering

Sony released the TR-55, its first transistor radio, but its focus was almost exclusively on the Japanese domestic market. True international success came with the more advanced TR-63 model in 1957. The first transistor radio, however, was the TR-1 from the American Regency Division of

Steve Jobs was born in GreenBay, Wisconsin, to Joanne Simpson and an Egyptian father, about whom almost nothing is known; he was later adopted by Paul and Clara Jobs of Mountain View, California.

The AEC, by a vote of 4 to 1, votes to suspend Robert Oppenheimer’s access to classified material, with Henry DeWolf Smyth voting 1:1 against. The AEC Commission is composed of three Democrats (Henry DeWolf Smyth, Thomas Murray, and Eugene Zuckert) and only two Republicans

American military intervention in Guatemala

A program for the development of intercontinental nuclear missiles (ICBMs) is being resumed in America; this is now made possible by the development of thermonuclear (fusion) warheads, which are much lighter than fission ones.

Soviet Union. Kengir Gulag uprising in Kazakhstan. The camp revolts. It’s the gulag where Alexander Solzhenitsyn is. The zeks (prisoners) now move freely from one area to another. The authorities are relenting. If all this had happened two years earlier, with Stalin still alive, the

Bikini Atoll; Operation Castle; “Yankee” detonation from a barge (5m); 13.5Mton; uses partially enriched lithium as fusion fuel (in another experiment called Romeo natural lithium was used) which allows an increase in efficiency of 61%

Last day of the security hearing against Robert Oppenheimer

Enrico Fermi testifies at the closed-door trial against Oppenheimer. In his testimony, he rejects the idea that Oppenheimer had somehow influenced the GAC members to vote against the hydrogen bomb program in October 1949. Fermi is also asked (off topic) whether, by remaining in Rome,

General Groves’ testimony at the Security Hearing: He claims that Oppenheimer could pose a security risk and that if he had known all the information against him, he would not have entrusted him with the Manhattan Project. Groves had actually been intimidated by Lewis Strauss

The Security Hearing for Robert Oppenheimer opens. Gordon Gray, chairman of the AEC, and Henry DeWolf Smyth will be the only one to vote against the proposal to remove Oppenheimer’s access to classified material; the majority (Roger Robb, Ward Evans, and Eugene Zuckert) will vote

NPO Yuzhnoye (OKB-586). Founded by Mikhail Yangel in Dnepropetrovsk, Ukraine, on April 10, 1954, by top-down order from the Party leadership, to remove Korolev’s rocket construction monopoly. It will build the Tsyklon and Zenit rockets. It currently supplies the first stage of the American Antares

For the second time in two years, a squadron of B-45s modified for reconnaissance (RB-45-C) flies at night over Lithuania (USSR), Belarus (USSR) and Ukraine (USSR), on behalf of the RAF, at the request of the Americans.

The Pentagon is selecting a spy plane to fly high above the USSR. An ambitious proposal from Fairchild is on the table, but then comes an unsolicited proposal from Lockheed. It’s the CL-282 project (later the U-2). Less ambitious than Fairchild’s, but achievable in a

President Ike Eisenhower, after reading the latest FBI report on Oppenheimer, gives instructions to remove access to classified material from Robert Oppenheimer.

The Soviet Union tests its first fusion bomb (Andrei Dimitrievich Sakharov) (“sloika”: fission bomb that triggers the fusion of deuterium on external layers that trigger the fission of uranium); in reality it will only be known decades later that the bomb tested in 1953 was

Kuhn formalizes the extensive Von Neumann form in Game Theory

Drastic drop in comic book sales, from 130 to 6 superhero titles, due to the advent of television

United States. Pete Conrad, the future Apollo 12, graduated from Princeton in the US Navy on June 16, 1953, and married Jane the next day. He had earlier entered the Naval Reserve Officer Training Corps at Princeton, and had embarked on the USS Missouri. In

Edmund Hillary and Sherpa Tenzing Norkay conquer Everest

Lewis Strauss, chairman of the American Atomic Energy Commission, begins a systematic campaign to destroy the reputation of Robert Oppenheimer; he begins by telling President Ike Eisenhower that he does not feel comfortable doing his job at the AEC if Oppenheimer continues to be connected

First Vietnam War.

A USAF T-40 rocket reaches Mach 5.18