What was going on when I was born?

THE creative urge that shook the earth 40 years ago with the detonation of the first atom bomb is today in the midst of a renaissance. According to weapon scientists and Federal officials, new kinds of nuclear arms are being imagined, developed and exploded at a furious pace.

GREAT universities seem to go through Camelot periods, heady eras in which they flourish. Over the last decade it has been the turn of the University of Texas at Austin for Camelot, a headlong rush into academic prestige fueled by the state's energy boom. The man who has presided over much of this flowering, Peter T. Flawn, will leave next month after six years as president of the state's premier public institution, proud of his success at raising the caliber of students and faculty, but also frustrated.

There is a greater than 50 percent chance that the President has no cancer whatsoever, that there are no cancer cells in his body, and he is completely cured.'' - Dr. Steven Rosenberg, a member of President Reagan's surgical team. [A1:6.]

Mayor Koch has raised $5,032,983 in campaign contributions, far more than his two chief rivals, according to financial reports filed with the Board of Elections yesterday. The Mayor has raised nearly nine times more than City Council President Carol Bellamy and almost 50 times more than Assemblyman Herman D. Farrell Jr., his major challengers, the records show.

As large New York teaching hospitals cut back, health officials say, medicine and surgery are being moved back toward the doctor's office, where modern medical practice began a century ago as a cottage industry. More and more physicians, they say, are shifting to private offices and clinics, nursing homes, group practices, health maintenance organizations and small community hospitals -all of them promising a less expensive and less complicated level of care that health experts say New York needs more of.

The Commerce Department said yesterday that business inventories fell four-tenths of 1 percent in May from the previous month, the steepest decline in more than two years, but economists found the news encouraging. The decline was interpreted as a sign of caution on the part of businesses. Economists explained, however, that because businesses have apparently been carefully monitoring their stockpiles, the chances of an economic downturn in the near future have been limited.

Companies

International

In the last few weeks, Hubert DeRonceray, a 53-year-old sociologist, has become involved in a public dispute with President Jean-Claude Duvalier. First, Mr. DeRonceray, a former Government minister, tried unsuccessfully to hold a protest march against the 28-year-long dynastic rule of the Duvalier family. Then, Mr. Duvalier tried to embarrass him by republishing in the Government-controlled press an encomium that Mr. DeRonceray wrote on the death of the President's father, Francois (Papa Doc) Duvalier.

Sales of domestically produced automobiles declined 15 percent in the first 10 days of July, according to reports today from the major automobile companies. The drop pushed the annual selling rate down to 7.5 million units, from an unusually strong 9.2 million rate in early July last year. But sales of light trucks, which include mini-vans and sports utility vehicles that are often substitutes for cars, increased 10.8 percent in the period, continuing the robust performance of this segment of the market.

Lieut. Kenneth deSanctis of the 19th Precinct squirmed at the memory of the well-dressed dowager, there to report the loss of a $40,000 brooch, sitting in a station house where the ceilings had caved in, the windows were filthy and telephone wires snaked across the floor. Police Officer Tony Ciffo, also of the 19th Precinct, chafed at the recollection of sweltering without air-conditioning in a building that was home to mice so bold they defied even the men in blue.

THE evening had all the trappings of a retirement party: More than two dozen guests drank champagne and offered toasts to the honoree's many decades of distinguished service. After 68 years, almost 25,000 nights of viewing that had yielded some of the most profound discoveries of modern science, it was the last night of scheduled operations for the 100-inch telescope of the Mount Wilson Observatory. One by one the party guests, including astronomers, technicians and officials of the Carnegie Institution of Washington, the nonprofit agency that has operated the Mount Wilson observatory for more than 80 years, departed into the night. Soon only Dr. Geoff Marcy, assistant professor of astronomy at San Francisco State University, and a skeleton technical staff remained behind to use the telescope one last time. Just before dawn broke over Southern California's San Gabriel Mountains on June 26, Dr. Marcy and the crew secured the instrument, covered its lenses, boarded up some entrances and turned out the lights on an era of science.