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 John Graham of Global Marine.

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 not compatible with each other. They began calling this idea “internetworking,” later shortened to “the internet.” Within a few months, the concept of gateways and TCP-IP would emerge.

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 vacuum; this cloud of oppositely charged particles tends to deflect other incoming particles. The conclusion is that the quantum vacuum causes the strong interaction to weaken as the energy of the environment increases. In practice, at high energies, particles behave as if they were free from any interaction. This will earn Gros, Politzer, and Wilczek the Nobel Prize.

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 every now and then,” with no further rational or causal explanation.

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 have taken power. And Mao was right: by fatally striking the Nationalists, the Japanese had weakened the main obstacle to Mao’s seizure of power.

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 Tu-144, the supersonic passenger plane designed to challenge the Anglo-French Concorde.

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 indirectly; $100 billion (adjusted for inflation)

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 immigration based on skin color, abolishing the British system of military honors, lowering the right to vote for eighteen-year-olds, raising the minimum wage, requiring industries to obtain ecological certification, increasing spending on Aboriginal people, legislating equal pay for women, divorce, and health insurance, abolishing university fees, and increasing subsidies for schools.

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 series of targeted assassinations of specific individuals. The goal was, on the one hand, to weaken the PLO, but above all to instill terror in all those who had embraced the cause of pro-Palestinian terrorism. Zwaiter was also on the list of those to be eliminated, and he was the first to fall at the hands of Israeli agents. The media coverage was widespread, and soon other important PLO members would be killed, in Europe and Lebanon. The operation, known as the “Wrath of God,” would conclude in 1979 with the spectacular killing in Lebanon of Ali Hassan Salameh, considered the main architect of the Munich Massacre, Arafat’s cousin and head of his elite group of bodyguards.

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 the Japanese game Go.

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, and Varese, 2012).

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