Hugh Everett is appointed head of the mathematics section of the Weapons Systems Evaluation Group.

Hungarian Prime Minister Imre Nagy is arrested by the Soviets who have occupied the country

Anglo-French troops withdraw from the Suez Canal Zone and are replaced by UN troops

Comet Arend-Roland, the unicorn comet (so called because of the orientation of its second tail, which is at a nearly flat angle – 180 degrees – to the first), is discovered.

The Soviet Union threatens to use atomic weapons if France and Britain do not withdraw from the Suez Canal Zone.

Franco-British landing at Port Said in Egypt

Hungary: Nagy launches final appeal on radio

Stockholm. John Bardeen, after dropping scrambled eggs on the floor when he received the Nobel Prize news, commits further gaffes: he washes his colored clothes, his vest, and his tailcoat from the ceremony together, staining everything green. On the day of the ceremony, he also takes quinine to calm his stomach, to no avail. During the ceremony, the Swedish king scolds Bardeen for leaving his children at home (he didn’t want them to miss an important exam at Harvard). To Bardeen’s final criticism, he replies that he will bring them to the next Nobel Prize. This will duly happen in 1972, when Bardeen receives the Nobel Prize in Physics for his theory of superconductivity (BCS Theory: Bardeen-Cooper-Schrieffer).

Budapest, Hungary: Anti-Soviet demonstration escalates into popular uprising; army fires on crowd, killing 80.

In the Physical Review, young physicists Tsung D. Lee and Chen N. Yang raise for the first time the issue of non-conservation of parity (parity symmetry breaking) in nuclear decay reactions. (In other words, by seeing the same reaction in a mirror, we can say with certainty that it is a mirror image; that is, in macroscopic reality, it is impossible.) This is the first parity symmetry breaking in physics; Leon Lederman will demonstrate it experimentally the following year. Lee and Yang will win the Nobel Prize for this. The universe is slightly left-handed… (In other words, the laws of physics at the quantum level change when a reaction is mirrored, that is, when spatial coordinates are inverted. Therefore, unlike macroscopic reality, it is possible at the quantum level to tell whether an image is the real one or the mirrored one.) Why is this important? When the universe formed in the Big Bang, it should have generated matter and antimatter in equal amounts, if nature treated them exactly the same, leaving behind nothing but energy to annihilate each other. Yet, our matter-dominated universe exists. CP (Charge and Parity) violation is essential to explaining this imbalance, although many aspects remain unsolved.

Secret agreement at Sevres between Israel, France, and Great Britain to regain control of the Suez Canal

New York City. The Game of the Century: American Bobby Fischer, 13, plays and wins at chess against Donald Byrne, the top seed in the national rankings and 13 years his senior. The 13-year-old Fischer makes two dramatic apparent sacrifices early in the game: first he exposes a knight and then he leaves his queen exposed and sacrifices it. But both moves have a reason, which will only become apparent a few moves later.

French Prime Minister Guy Mollet proposed to British Prime Minister Anthony Eden that France and Great Britain unite as a single nation. The proposal would come to light exactly half a century later and be announced by the BBC under the headline “Vive la Frangleterre!” At the very least, there would have been some “difficulties” for the French in accepting the authority of the British Crown…

Bikini Atoll; Operation RedWing; “Dakota” detonation on the surface (4m); 1.1Mton; prototype of the W-28 warhead, the most versatile and widely used American warhead, will be produced in 5 models and 20 variants; the test warhead weighed 815Kg, with a diameter of 50cm and a length of 152cm

The last British troops leave the Suez Canal Zone

Arthur W. Anderson discovers the bacterial species Deinococcus Radiodurans, during sessions to sterilize food through radiation: it is a bacterium that survives intense doses of radiation, indeed it thrives inside nuclear reactors.

A brutal Soviet crackdown on a demonstration in Tbilisi, Georgia. A young Eduard Shevardnadze witnesses it.

Civil war in Sudan: 500,000 dead.

The entire Presidium of the Soviet Communist Party visits Korolev at his NII-88 compound. There, Korolev demonstrates the new R-7 rocket (which will remain in use well into the 21st century), capable of delivering a thermonuclear warhead to American targets in less than half an hour. Khrushchev is so enthusiastic that he soon drastically cuts the Red Army’s strength and provides enormous funding for Korolev’s missile program. This will lay the foundation for the Soviet space successes of the next half century, for the evolution of the arms race in the second half of the Cold War, and will also create dissent among Soviet military leaders, which will ultimately lead to Khrushchev’s dismissal.

Nikita Khrushchev, Secretary of the CPSU, on the rostrum of the 20th Congress, systematically destroyed Stalin’s image in the so-called “Secret Speech”: he denounced Stalin, his predecessor, as having committed “gross abuse of power,” “cruel and inhuman torture,” “mass deportations and the murder of thousands of people without trial,” using very simple methods: “beating, beating, and beating again.” The Secret Speech sparked unrest in Poland and revolution in Hungary.

Soviet Union. Yuri Gagarin takes the oath of office as a member of the Soviet Communist Party.

On the centenary of Nikola Tesla’s birth, the unit of measurement of the magnetic field is called the Tesla, symbol “T”.

The formal birth date of Artificial Intelligence (AI). John McCarthy, Paul Shannon, Marvin Minsky, and Arthur Samuel, all at Dartmouth College in Hanover, New Hampshire, discuss it.

John Nash became famous by solving the Riemann Embedding Problem. Shortly thereafter, he fell into a profound schizophrenic psychosis. The Riemann Embedding Problem: Is it possible to embed every surface, and more generally every manifold with a metric in the Riemannian sense, into some n-dimensional Euclidean space such that the metric (and hence the distance) on the manifold is the same as the one inherited from the Euclidean ambient space?

Hugh Everett delivers the complete dissertation: The theory of the Universal Wave Function

The Soviet Union tests its first uncapped hydrogen fusion bomb

Edward F. Moore invents the Finite State Automaton

Englishman Christopher Cockerell patents the hovercraft, the first amphibious air-cushion vehicle