Geologist Walter Alvarez lands a job at Berkeley, where his father, the renowned quantum physicist Luis Alvarez, also works. Luis, in addition to having made fundamental contributions to the invention of the atomic bomb and particle accelerators, also revealed, using muon detectors, that the Egyptian
Berlinguer declared himself opposed to Italy’s withdrawal from NATO. On June 15, 1976, the Corriere della Sera published an interview with Enrico Berlinguer by Giampaolo Pansa in which the PCI secretary argued that it would be better for his party and for Italy to remain
Argentina. Videla’s Dirty War causes the disappearance of over 30,000 people.
United Nations, New York. Resolution 3375 is passed, declaring that “Zionism is a form of racism and racial discrimination.”
China. Deng Xiaoping prioritizes science and technology before he can fully launch his program. He is purged a second time and then returns from exile for good.
Leningrad. Vladimir Putin enters his first post after graduation: the KGB Regional Directorate, as a second lieutenant.
Venera 9 launches, transmitting the first black-and-white panoramic images of Venus for 53 minutes.
Oskar Schindler dies. German Oskar Schindler, credited with saving 1,200 Jews from the Holocaust, dies at 66. During the Nazi era, of which he was a member, Schindler ran a factory in Krakow that employed Polish workers from the nearby Jewish ghetto. When the ghetto
Off the coast of Hawaii. The Hughes Glomar Explorer, in a ceremony as close as possible to the official Soviet Navy one, buries the remains of the sailors found on K-129 at sea. They include six intact bodies, covered by the Soviet flag, and hundreds
Charles Lindbergh dies in Maui, Hawaii, of lymphoma. He lies in the Ho’omau Church Cemetery in Kipahulu, Maui.
The Americans and British release 1.5 million pages of decrypted documents from World War II. The crucial role played by British and British intelligence in the Battle of Cape Matapan, the Battle of Midway, the downing of Yamamoto’s plane, the Battle of Stalingrad, the Normandy
Pompidou and Brandt, panicked by OPEC’s stance, decide to lay the foundations for a solid friendship with the Arab world; their European colleagues will immediately agree.
After being abandoned for more than a century, the restoration of the Bourbon Fortress of Civitella del Tronto began (and was completed in 1985), the place where the Bourbon garrison, the last bastion of the Kingdom of the Two Sicilies, after a siege lasting about
The American probe Pioneer 10, just 20 months after its launch, has already entered Jupiter’s magnetosphere, a planet it will fly by two weeks later. It took 500 photographs and absorbed 10,000 times more radiation than in Earth orbit. It is the first human-made object
Libya, Saudi Arabia and other Arab countries implement oil embargo against the US
Austerity begins: The Arab-dominated Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC) decides to reduce oil exports by 5 percent until Israel withdraws from the territories occupied in the Yom Kippur War. Failing that, Saudi Arabia and several other nations will reduce production even more drastically.
OPEC raises the price of a barrel of oil from $2.46 to $9.60/barrel
‘t Hooft demonstrates that Yang-Mills fields constitute a well-defined theory of the interactions of subatomic particles. Twenty years earlier, Professor C.C. Yang and his student R.L. Mills had generalized Maxwell’s fields to the weak and strong nuclear forces by introducing the force-carrying W particles and
Apollo 17 (Saturn V SA-512): Eugene Cernan, Ronald Evans, and Harrison Schmitt (Geologist) complete the sixth lunar landing with the Command Module America and the Lunar Module Challenger; they remain on the Moon for 3 days 2 hours 59 minutes, walk on the Moon for
After the kidnapping and killing of 11 Israeli athletes at the Munich Olympics, the three surviving terrorists were freed and transferred to Lebanon at the request of the hijacker of a small plane. They were immediately interviewed on TV and declared that they had done
Vietnam. After an initial ceasefire agreement between the United States and North Vietnam, Defense Secretary Laird announces a suspension of bombing.
Vietnam: The partisan and Hanoi offensive against South Vietnam begins. There are four fronts: the 17th parallel border, the Cambodian border north of Saigon, the highland region, and the Mekong Delta.
Moon. The Soviet Lunokhod rover’s polonium core fails, its temperature drops, and it dies. It travels 11 kilometers. It is the greatest Soviet success on the Moon.
Steve Wozniak reads an article in Esquire describing how a group of young people have created a device that emits the right tones to fool the Bell telephone system and allow free long-distance calls. That evening, he calls his friend Steve Jobs, reads the article
Bill Pitts of Stanford University and Hugh Tuck of California Polytechnic University used a PDP-11 minicomputer to make one of the first video games: Galaxy Game, which debuted in the Stanford cafeteria in October 1971. They charged a few coins to play. The game was
First launch of the spy satellite system replacing CORONA. (Still classified at the time of writing – 2015)
Professor Harry Whittington of Cambridge University publishes the first monograph of Burgess’s Shale Bestiary, initiating a comprehensive reexamination that will lead to a revolutionary interpretation not only of Burgess’s fauna but of all life on Earth: the history of life is a story of mass
Apollo 14: Alan Shepard, an avid golfer, faces the camera and announces: “In my left hand I have a little white pellet that’s familiar to millions of Americans…” With a 6-iron, hidden from NASA, he tries to hit the ball. The first shot misses, the
3:54 PM: Apollo 14: Alan Shepard sets foot on the Moon: “It’s been a long way, but we’re here”; once landed at Fra Mauro, he is moved by the beauty of the view of Earth and cries.
Apollo 14: The CM and LM fail to dock; for 1 hour and 42 minutes they fail to connect, then Shepard finally announces: “We’ve got a hard dock!”
Space Shuttle Phase B begins: orbiter contracts are awarded to McDonnell Douglas and Martin Marietta; and North American Rockwell and General Dynamics; engine contracts are awarded to Pratt and Whitney, Rocketdyne, and Aerojet.
The Venera 7 launch lands on Venus and transmits data and images for 23 minutes.
First Drop-Test of a scale model called Faget DC-3, the first prototype of the Space Shuttle; it is 4m long, it is released from 3700m and recovered by parachute.
The Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty signed on July 1, 1968, enters into force.
Yuri Matijasievic finds the last piece of the puzzle and proves Julia Robinson’s assertion and thus Hilbert’s tenth problem: there is no program that can determine whether any equation has a solution.
A small meteorite fell in Murchinson, Australia: the meteorite contained amino acids also present on Earth and others of alien origin such as isovaline and pseudoleucine.
Larry Roberts, project manager for the ARPANET project, calls for tenders among several companies to build the IMPs (Interface Message Processors, now called Routers). They must manage the packet switching technology developed by Paul Baran for military robustness against a Soviet thermonuclear attack. They must
6:19 – 6:37 AM Italian time: Armstrong and Aldrin place seven carefully selected experiments on the lunar surface from thousands of proposals; the most famous is the LRRR or Lrcubed: a series of mirrors designed to reflect a laser beam from planet Earth back to
6:02 am Italian time: Armstrong and Aldrin leave on the lunar soil the so-called “mementos”, namely: two Soviet medals in honor of Yuri Gagarin who died in March 1968 and of Vladimir Komarov who was killed during the re-entry of Soyuz 1 due to the
By the time NASA landed on the Moon, it had already purchased a million integrated circuits for the Apollo missions alone, contributing to the development of the technology and reducing production costs. The first integrated circuits purchased by NASA cost $1,000; by the end of
protest march of Black Americans, led by Dr. Abernathy, Martin Luther King’s successor, arrives at the gates of Cape Kennedy: “Beyond that gate is the pride of America, on this side is the shame of America.” Thomas Paine of NASA responds, “If it were possible
The state of El Salvador militarily invades Honduras. The problems began on June 6, 1969, when El Salvador lost a soccer match (!) against Honduras; a fan committed suicide and was granted a state funeral. El Salvador then won the return match of the North
As the Saturn V heads for the launch pad, the gigantic N-1 explodes during launch at Baikonur in the USSR; it is the second launch of the gigantic rocket. The Kremlin does not make the incident public, but it is discovered by the top-secret American
Another Soviet UR-500/Proton launcher carrying a lunar sample return rover explodes on launch.
The Saturn V (Saturn V SA-506) of the Apollo 11 mission moves slowly toward the launch pad
AMD (Advanced Micro Devices) is founded by Jerry Sanders. Sanders had previously worked at Fairchild Semiconductor, where he met giants like Noyce, Moore, and Andy Grove, and then founded Intel. He finally founded AMD in 1969, only to spend three decades in court over intellectual