About ten years ago, doing research for a book, I asked Freeman Dyson about a study he’d helped do about whether we would have lost the war in Vietnam a little less if we’d used tactical nuclear weapons. Dyson and two colleagues, all members of a scientific advisory group called Jason, were doing this study […]
LWON
Alex Wellerstein is an historian of science at the American Institute of Physics with an obsession about the atomic bomb and in particular, about the patents taken out on it. Patents on the atomic bomb seem odd: apparently the government wanted to be sure it owned the rights, and not the “private contractors, private scientists, […]
I swear, I heard the short version of this just a little while ago. Graduate student X: I hate that one kid in our class. Graduate student Y: You mean that undergraduate? The one who always talks? The kid who never says anything, he just talks? Graduate student X: That’s the one. I really hate […]
You probably know this. In August, 1939, Einstein wrote a letter to the American government. German scientists had announced that the energy holding an atom together could be released – in fact, 2.2 pounds-worth of uranium atoms would equal 10,000 tons of TNT. Einstein said this implied a new kind of bomb that Hitler’s government […]
From “On Being the Right Size,” by J.B.S. Haldane: “You can drop a mouse down a thousand-yard mine shaft; and on arriving at the bottom, it gets a slight shock and walks away. A rat is killed, a man is broken, a horse splashes.” Recently, a couple of my friends have fallen. One, a woman, […]
Happy Birthday to us, we’ve just turned two. We’re bigger: we’ve added three new Persons of LWON. And we’ve matured, that is, we stopped looking so much at our own bellybutton and are more aware of the intelligent, thoughtful Commenters of LWON. So for our birthday celebration, we’ll look back at the year and not […]
4/20: I write an email to a scientist. I explain that I work in an old building that sits in a sort of pit, partly surrounded by a hill. Midway along the hill is a little terrace on which is a street, and along the street, a sidewalk and a wire fence; and they’re all […]
I’ve had occasion in these pages before to write about searches for alien planets and alien life and for both, to register the loftiest disdain. I mean, crissakes, the universe is jam-packed with philosophy-shattering freakshows, and we’re looking for things we already know exist? Planets and life are not news. I learned this outlook from […]