Lauding Lise Meitner, Who Said ‘No’ to the Atomic Bomb

Depending on whom you ask, you’ll get a lot of different dates for the onset of the Anthropocene. Stratigraphers, who like clarity, tend to favor the early 1950s. As the United States and the Soviet Union vied for Strangelovian supremacy, aboveground nuclear testing became routine. The tests left behind a more or less permanent marker—a spike in ra

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The weight of all of this evidence is that low doses of radiation do not cause detectable harm. Little to no cancer, or at least far less than predicted by LNT, is found in the subjects receiving low doses, such as workers operating under modern safety standards, or populations in high-background areas.

Thomas Gold was a professor of astrophysics at Cornell University and one of the most interesting scientists of the 20th century. He had a notable penchant for diving into completely new fields and developing hypotheses utterly at odds with the scientific consensus of the day. His many achievements include correcting the understanding of how the hu... See more