Rocky Kolb is an opera buff, so one of the things we talked about during our recent breakfast was the upcoming production of Doctor Atomic in Chicago. When this opera about the Manhattan Project had its world premier in 2005, San Francisco Opera asked us to create a Website exploring the science and historical context behind the development of the atomic bomb. The Exploratoirum has its part of the story, our founder Frank Oppenheimer worked on the Manhattan Project with his brother, J. Robert, who was its scientific director. Richard Rhodes, the Pulitzer Prize winning author of The Making of the Atomic Bomb, helped us with the history and I traveled with Exploratorium artist Susan Schwartzenberg to Los Alamos, New Mexico to mine the archives there for photographs and clues about what it was like for the scientists and their families to live and work in the desert isolation. With Doctor Atomic opening in Chicago Rocky would like to highlight the University of Chicago’s role in the story. There’s a lot to work with: one of the primary characters in the opera is Enrico Fermi who spent much of his career at the University of Chicago. He provided the proof on concept for a nuclear chain reaction by building the famous pile on a squash court at Chicago.

Since I’m new to the blogging world, I wanted to try an experiment to insert YouTube video into my blog. This video was taken a few years ago when I was in Antarctica for our Origins Project. I persuaded the National Science Foundation to let me dive under the ice and it was one of the most exhilirating experiences of my life: hundreds of feet of visibility and near-freezing temperatures.

I had a fascinating breakfast meeting with Rocky Kolb while he was in Berkeley recently giving a talk. Rocky formerly led the particle astrophysics group at Fermilab and is now chair of astronomy and astrophysics at the University of Chicago. He’s also a great public speaker and a bit of a celebrity: Rocky was Dr. December in the Stud Muffins of Science Calendar, circa 1996. One of the things we talked about over eggs and pancakes was the dual personality of physics. More than any other scientific discipline, physics depends on two varieties of scientist: the theorist and the experimentalist. Rocky is a theorist, but probably the most famous theoretical physicist was Einstein. His relativity theories, written early in the last century, kept the experimentalists who build observatories and particle accelerators busy for decades trying to confirm his theoretical predictions. But experimentalists like nothing better than coming up with observations about the universe, matter, or the inner workings of particles that catch theorists with their mathematical pants down. A sign about the doorway of condensed matter physicist Sid Nagel reads: Here is where theories come to die. Rocky’s take: “We’re smarter, better looking and generally taller.” But the shorter ones do occasionally exact their revenge. It happened in 1999 when Saul Perlmutter from the Lawrence Berkeley Lab announced that, billions of years after the big bang, the universe was actually accelerating rather than slowing down and collapsing under the weight of gravity. No theorist had predicted this finding and collectively they’ve been scratching their heads ever since trying to explain it. “This is the first time in 3000 years of cosmology that theorists are playing catch-up to the experimentalists. In the past there were more theories than observations could confirm or refute, but now there are more observations that the theories can not explain, ” Rocky told me. It’s certainly an interesting time to be a cosmologist and a sideline observer.