Related papers: Decoding the Manhattan Project's Network: Unveilin…

A personal account of work on the Manhattan Project in Chicago by one of the few remaining survivors of the war-time project is given, illustrating, among other things, how absurd things can happen at a time of great stress and concern.. As…

In 1943 fear that the German war machine might use atomic bombs was abating and among physicists another fear was taking its place - that of a postwar nuclear arms race with worldwide proliferation of nuclear weapons. Manhattan Project…

The atomic bomb American program known as Manhattan Project has been studied in detail. Historians argue that the beginning of this program is rooted in the letter Einstein sent to American President Roosevelt in the summer of 1939. This…

The Large Hadron Collider (LHC), the particle accelerator operating at CERN, is probably the most complex and ambitious scientific project ever accomplished by humanity. The sheer size of the enterprise, in terms of financial and human…

In this article, I trace the early historical developments that ultimately led to the creation of the atomic bomb. Even after the completion of weapons, many scientists continued to argue that nuclear armaments were indispensable for…

Humankind is confronted with a "nuclear stewardship curse", facing the prospect of needing to manage nuclear products over long time scales in the face of the short-time scales of human polities. I propose a super Manhattan-type effort to…

Nuclear physics advances in the US and Britain, from 1939-1945, are described. The Manhattan Project's work led to an explosion in our knowledge of nuclear science. A conference in April 1943 at Los Alamos provided a simple formula used to…

The Trinity test of July 16, 1945 marked the scientific apex of the Manhattan Project. Often recognized as the symbolic birth of the nuclear age, Trinity's multifaceted legacy remains just as captivating and complex as it did 75 years ago.…

Since 2004, I have been collaborating with artist Josiah McElheny on the design of cosmological sculptures, inspired originally by the chandeliers of the Metropolitan Opera House in New York. The four works that we have completed to date…

MIT wanted to commission a large scale artwork that would serve to 'illuminate a new campus gateway, inaugurate a space of exchange between MIT and Cambridge, and inspire our students, faculty, visitors, and the surrounding community to…

Celebrating 170th anniversary of the discovery of Neptune, I review the story of the discovery that startled the world. The story is an interplay of scientific triumph and human weakness and an example of how science works in a…

The Web has made it possible to harness human cognition en masse to achieve new capabilities. Some of these successes are well known; for example Wikipedia has become the go-to place for basic information on all things; Duolingo engages…

I discuss issues of inverting feasibly computable functions, optimal discovery algorithms, and the constant overheads in their performance.

The September 11 terrorist attack against America has caused a lot of concern to the American public and the entire world, which is suspecting a new attack sooner or later. The most frightening scenario is the one involving the detonation…

We analyze the reaction of academic communities to a particular urgent topic which abruptly arises as a scientific problem. To this end, we have chosen the disaster that occurred in 1986 in Chornobyl (Chernobyl), Ukraine, considered as one…

Two of the major achievements of Stephen Hawking are described in elementary terms. They are his work on the beginning of the universe and his work on the end of black holes. These are perhaps the scientific achievements for which he is…

In Europe (e.g., in Italy), and in the States, the opinion is widely spreading that the negative consequences of modern progress are the fault of "Science". A lively debate on this topic took place among the famous writer Leonardo Sciascia…

The possibility that experiments at high-energy accelerators could create new forms of matter that would ultimately destroy the Earth has been considered several times in the past quarter century. One consequence of the earliest of these…

This article is set during the 1944 and 1945 final push to complete Project Y -- the Manhattan Project at Los Alamos -- and focuses primarily on overcoming the challenge of creating and demonstrating a successful convergent explosive…

Three-nucleon forces are crucial for the accurate description of nuclear systems, including dense matter probed in neutron stars. We explore nuclear Hamiltonians that reproduce two-nucleon scattering data and properties of light nuclei, but…