Until the fires hit last week [in May 2000], this town slumbered in post-atomic anonymity, stuck away on a quiet, wooded plateau on a shoulder of the Jemez Mountains, 30 miles northwest of Santa Fe.
Physics
Los Alamos, New Mexico • Photo by Daniel Schwen (CC BY-SA 3.0)
The fireball of the world's first nuclear test • US Department of Defense (Public Domain)
Understanding billion-year-old light in a century
What was the most important science story of the century?
Photo by Francesco Gallarotti on Unsplash
Intergalactic allusions to illusions
There is a week in late November when my walk across the meadows to work in the morning takes me directly into the rising sun. Ahead of me along the double track, as if in a gun sight, the sun lifts its fiery globe above the horizon.
Photo by Thomas Kinto on Unsplash
Things too beautiful not to be true
“Beauty is truth, truth beauty,” wrote John Keats.
The culmination of the Manhattan Project • US Department of Energy (Public Domain)
Our family album of the bomb
The Danish physicist Niels Bohr, the father of atomic physics, was skeptical.
Photo by Ricardo Esquivel from Pexels
Still, the X‑ray retains its hold on our imagination
Stout little X, with its feet planted firmly on the ground and its arms uplifted in surprise, is our emissary to the unknown.
Hiroshima in the aftermath of the atomic bombing • US Department of Defense (Public Domain)
The two faces of knowledge
It was the defining event of the 20th century, an exclamation point at the middle of the sentence.
Photo by Jared Erondu on Unsplash
Debauched on light
Somehow, I’m always late getting around to reading the really delicious books.
Image by Matthias Wewering from Pixabay
We’ll always be stuck in the middle
“You’re searching, Joe, for things that don’t exist.”
Image by Karolina Grabowska on Pixabay
Conversations with my coffee maker
I had been reading Roger Penrose’s new book on the science of human consciousness and wanted to discuss it with my wife.