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Two mathematicians at the University of Illinois, Kenneth Appel and Wolfgang Haken, solve the four-color problem. Or: Is it possible to draw a political map with a minimum number of colors greater than four? (Without allowing two countries bordering at more than one point to

Toronto. The 553-meter-tall Canada National Tower is built.

10 deaths in Italy due to terrorism

Establishment of the CSCE (Conference on Collective Security) in Europe.

Space: 1999 is a science fiction television series born from the fertile imagination of Gerry and Sylvia Anderson; the protagonists are Martin Landau, Barbara Bain and Barry Morse

Whittington also completed his monograph on Opabinia from the Burgess Shale: “Opabinia regalis is not believed to have been a trilobitomorphic arthropod, nor even an annelid. The Burgess Shale contains other undescribed segmented animals of uncertain affinities.” Despite the lack of emphasis, this is a

Terrorists attack OPEC headquarters. In Vienna, terrorist Ilich Ramírez Sánchez, known as Carlos, leads a raid on the oil ministers’ conference of OPEC, the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries. The Arab and German terrorists attack, killing three people and taking 63 hostages, including 11 OPEC

Sara Jane Moore, who attempted to assassinate President Gerald Ford by shooting him at the St. Francis Hotel in San Francisco but missed, served a life sentence in prison, but was released on December 31, 2007, at age 77, a few months after Gerald Ford’s

Chile. General Pinochet entrusts economic policy to neoliberal consultants: the Chicago Boys (from the Milton Friedman school of Chicago). This decision is unexpected, and the reason remains unclear: Pinochet is in no way an expert in economics or finance. Nonetheless, it brings considerable prosperity to

The Viking 2 probe is launched toward Mars. It will gently descend on Utopia Planitia. The two Viking 1 and 2 probes took 50,000 images from Martian orbit before descending, mapping 97% of the surface. They will conduct biological experiments on the Martian surface to

Fear of the military use of the American Shuttle is causing the Russians to study the Buran option: a shuttle capable of dropping a nuclear device on the US fleet at sea.

The Soviets secretly launch two manned Almaz stations into orbit for the purpose of photographic espionage of the US and future missile weaponry.

American Bobby Fischer relinquishes his title as World Chess Champion to Soviet Anatoly Karpov without playing a single game.

Pol Pot and the Khmer Rouge in power in Cambodia: 1.5 – 2 million dead

The Los Angeles Times publishes revelations about a secret CIA project to recover a Soviet submarine. Journalists are on the trail of Project Azorian, through which the CIA had indeed already recovered part of the submarine the year before. But the article is inaccurate and

The American magazine Popular Mechanics published an article on the Altair personal computer. The computer was nothing more than a set of integrated circuits worth $495 that the buyer then soldered onto a printed circuit board. Its functionality was limited. However, the article attracted the

The British government released the first photographs of the Colossus computer, built in 1943 and put into operation in February 1944. Further documents were declassified by the American government in 1996, but not the role played by Colossus in decrypting Nazi teletype messages, which was

The US Navy deploys the first Nimitz-class aircraft carrier (2 nuclear reactors on board): of the same class are the Nimitz, Eisenhower, Vinson, Roosevelt, Lincoln, Washington, Stennis, Truman, Reagan, Bush

26 deaths in Italy due to terrorism

40 degrees North, 180 degrees West, North Pacific. 5,500 meters deep. The Hughes Glomar Explorer, carrying what remains of the front end of the Soviet K-129, finishes scanning the surface to ensure there are no floating objects that might reveal the nature of the cargo:

Norio Taniguchi coins the term “nanotechnology” to mean machines with tolerances of less than 1mm

There are already about ten synchrotrons worldwide. The first began operating in October 1946 at the General Electric laboratories, thanks to Ernest Lawrence.

Salyut 3 is launched. It will be crewed 8 days later by Pavel Popovich and Yuri Artyukhin, who will stay on board for 15 days.

The Hughes GL Explorer departs Pier E for the site of the sinking of the Soviet K-129 on the Date Line in the North Pacific.

Israel. Prime Minister Golda Meir resigns and passes the baton to Yazhak Rabin. Moshe Dayan also withdraws from the cabinet. These events, along with Ben-Gurion’s death on November 29, 1974, seem to mark the end of an era.

Mariner 10 completes its first flyby of Mercury and makes the first use of a flyby, suggested by Italian Giuseppe “Bepi” Colombo. The Paduan professor, in fact, is invited by JPL in the United States to participate in a conference on Mariner 10’s Mercury-bound mission.

With the Samarium Cobalt rare earth magnets based on SmCo17, the second generation of rare earth magnets is born.

Great Britain. The so-called “Lighthill Report” criticizes Artificial Intelligence (AI) programs in the UK, accusing them of failing to deliver on their promises. The report will cause a collapse in AI investment, first in the UK and then in the US, leading to what will

Aldo Moro is Prime Minister of Italy

After 15 underground test explosions, the American Plowshire program for the use of nuclear explosions for planetary engineering, i.e., large-scale reshaping of the earth’s surface, was halted; the similar Soviet program continued until 1986.

Bruno Zumino of CERN in Geneva lays the foundations, with Julius Wess, of supersymmetry, using the twistor theory

40 deaths in Italy from terrorism

Alexander S. Holevo of the Steklov Mathematical Institute in Moscow proves that qubits contain hidden information that can be manipulated but not read, unless it is collapsed to a state of 0 or 1.

Mazara del Vallo, Sicily. A notorious homeless man, known as Omu Cani (the dog man), is found dead of natural causes. He was known for mentally calculating cube roots, and some suspect he was Ettore Majorana. Paolo Borsellino also investigates the case, concluding that he

Misner, Thorne, Wheeler publish, through Freeman, the famous tome “Gravitation”

Daniel Kahneman publishes Attention and Effort, in which he illustrates the countless scientific experiments conducted on Cognitive Pupillometry, measuring the effects on our psyche of certain circumstances and questions, through the observation of pupil dilation.

On October 7, 1973, during the Jewish holiday of Yom Kippur (Yom Kippur War), Egypt and Syria launched a surprise attack against Israel. Egyptian troops broke through the Israeli defensive line until October 10, while Jordanian and Syrian troops entered Golna. Then, Israel mobilized, and

Andrew Prentice claims (incorrectly) that the Sun has exhausted its hydrogen fuel and is therefore composed of a helium core. This would have triggered the final energy crisis of our star, which would take a few million years to reach the surface of the sun.

Peron president of Argentina, for the third time

After a lengthy legal battle, Judge Larson rules that Mauchly and Eckert’s patent for the first computer (ENIAC) is invalid, deeming the invention to be directly derived from Atanasoff’s earlier work.

The GPS project was born from the fusion of a US Air Force and a US Navy project

The Skylab crew blasts off on the Saturn IB SA-206; one of their tasks is to fix the defective solar panel. Pete Conrad, who had already been on Gemini 5, Gemini 11, and Apollo 12, also participates in the first manned mission to Skylab, alongside

The Hughes Glomar Explorer, a covert CIA vessel, sets sail from Delaware Bay. It is headed to fish for the wreck of the Soviet K-129. The design and construction of the vessel, a technical marvel (a feat considered impossible by the Soviets), was directed by

The American probe Pioneer 11 leaves Earth, headed for Jupiter, which it will reach in November 1974.

ARPANET Project. Robert Kahn, a former BBN employee who built the first IMPs (routers), realized that all the different computer networks could be seamlessly interconnected. There were countless different networks, such as the LAN PARC in Palo Alto, ALOHAnet, PRNET, and SATNET, all packet-switched but

David Politzer, David Gross, Franck Wilczek, Tony Zee, and Gerardus t’Hooft discover the Principle of Asymptotic Freedom. This is the physical phenomenon whereby a charged particle in a vacuum, such as an electron, attracts oppositely charged particles from among those continually created in the cosmic

Edward Tryon, an American particle physicist, ventures a hypothesis previously explored by Pascual Jordan and George Gamow: the entire universe may be a fluctuation of the quantum vacuum state, governed by Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle. The universe could simply be “one of those things that happens

J.M. Smith, G.R. Price publish “The Logics of Animal Conflict” in the context of Game Theory.

The brilliant and eclectic graduate student Simon Conway Morris of Cambridge University visits Walcott’s famous collection of Burgess Shales and begins a systematic review of the fossils that will lead to the discovery of dozens more species.

Japanese Prime Minister Tanaka Kakue apologizes to Chinese President Mao Zedong for his country’s actions in China during the war. Mao, who has a macabre sense of humor, tells his foreign guest not to worry: if it weren’t for the Japanese, the Communists would never

Soviet Union. Andrei Tupolev dies. TASS lists the planes he designed, but fails to mention that many of them were designed while he was imprisoned in a prison city (Aviation Gulag), forbidden to leave. At the time of his death, he was working on the

27 hours after the liftoff of the last Lunar Module of the Apollo missions, the Rover’s automatic camera also stopped working.

Apollo 17: The last men to leave the Moon arrive on Earth; they are Eugene Cernan, Harrison Schmitt, and Ronald Evans (in orbit): in total, 12 different American astronauts, in 6 different missions, walked on the lunar surface. Apollo Project: 500,000 people involved full-time, millions

Gene Cernan, before leaving the lunar surface, at the end of his last EVA (Extra Vehicular Activity), writes the name of his 9-year-old daughter Tracy on the lunar soil dust.

Larry Page, co-founder of Google with Sergey Brin, is born.

Another Soviet N-1/L3 rocket explodes on launch. It also had a complete lunar lander on board. This is the last attempt. Political appetite for the lunar landing has faded after several American landings and the cancellation of the post-Apollo 17 missions.

Niles Eldredge and Stephen Jay Gould develop the theory of Punctuated Equilibria which predicts a Darwinian development of species marked by sudden changes followed by long periods of quasi-stasis

Nobel Prize in Physics to John Bardeen, Leon N. Cooper, and J. Robert Schrieffer for their development of the theory of superconductivity (BCS theory).

Coca-Cola introduces PET (Polyethylene terephthalate) for its bottles

Australia. New Labor Prime Minister Gough Whitlam embarks on an ambitious and far-reaching series of selective reforms, in many ways unprecedented in the Western world: ending conscription, withdrawing from Vietnam, recognizing the People’s Republic of China, establishing independence for Papua New Guinea, prohibiting restrictions on

Vietnam. There is a ceasefire agreement between the United States and North Vietnam. However, South Vietnam’s position is unclear.

Rome. A nominally independent Israeli group, but in fact linked to the Mossad, assassinated the PLO representative in Rome, Wael Zwaiter, in Piazza Annibaliano (Trieste district). After the massacre of Israeli athletes at the Munich Olympics (September 1972), Golda Meir and her staff planned a

Nolan Bushnell founds Atari. He initially wanted to call it Syzygy (a term for when three celestial bodies are aligned), but, fortunately for pronunciation, the term had already been trademarked by a hippie community that made candles, and he settled on Atari, the name of

Rocketdyne finally wins contract for Space Shuttle Main Engines (SSME)

3:23 AM Italian time: Apollo 16: The LM Orion lands on the moon in the Descartes Highlands. John Young and Charlie Duke land on the Descartes Highlands. Charlie Duke, who has visited us in Italy several times (we met him, for example, in Bologna, 2010,

8:27 am Italian time: Apollo 16: due to a problem with the engines that orient the CM’s Main Motor, the astronauts are left in orbit around the Moon for 15 orbits

United States. US President Johnson suffers a massive heart attack.

Niles Eldredge and Stephen Jay Gould publish in Nature the theory of Punctuated Equilibrium according to which the evolution of organisms occurs in short accelerations followed by long periods of stasis

The Whole Earth Catalog, an American magazine, espouses the philosophy that technology should be accessible to all. Its final issue, in 1971, features the words “Stay hungry, stay foolish,” which Steve Jobs would echo in his famous Stanford speech more than thirty years later.

The Soviet Mars 3 probe lands on Mars, but ceases transmission only 14 seconds later. It manages to transmit a photograph before static electricity from a terrible dust storm disables it. Its twin probe, Mars 2, crashes into the Martian surface that same day.

Ray Tomlinson, an MIT engineer working for BBN, decided to combine two software packages, SNDMSG and CPYNET, to create an electronic mail (e-mail) system over the ARPANET. He also invented a way to address messages using the @ symbol. After just two years, in 1973,

London. The Computed Tomography (CT) device, which produces a series of X-ray images of the human body, is brought for testing at Atkinson Morley Hospital. It had been invented and then developed in the previous years by Godfrey Hounsfield of the English company EMI (Electric

5:00 PM Italian time: Apollo 15: The most famous lunar sample is collected: number 15415, better known as Genesis Rock, initially dated to 4.5 billion years ago, when the Solar System was only 100 million years old, but then the dating is corrected to 4

3:29 PM Italian time: Apollo 15: David Scott lands on the Moon and says: “Man must explore… and this is exploration at its greatest”; the Lunar Rover 1 awaits him, folded up like a toy in a matchbox.

12:13 AM Italian time: Apollo 15: David Scott lands the LM on the Moon; weighed down by several tons compared to the other LMs, mainly due to the rover, the landing is rather violent.

Apollo 15 (Saturn V SA-510): David Scott (friend of Albert Hopkins), Alfred Worden, and James Irwin complete their fourth lunar landing (Command Module Endeavour and Lunar Module Falcon); they remain on the Moon for 2 days 18 hours 54 minutes, walk on the Moon for

Shortly after the failed launch of Mariner 8 to Mars (which shattered into pieces due to a rocket problem), NASA successfully launched Mariner 9 toward the Red Planet. On the same days, the Soviets launched Mars 2 and 3. Both the Americans and Russians often

West Germany. Peak terrorist activity by the far-left RAF movement. In 1977, three terrorists committed suicide in prison.

Bangladesh War of Independence. 1.7 million dead.

Barack Obama goes to live in Hawaii with his grandparents