Sublime

David Keith, a professor of applied physics at Harvard, has been described as “perhaps the foremost proponent of geoengineering,” a characterization that he bristles at. “I’m a proponent of reality,” he wrote in a letter to the editor of The New York Times in 2015. Keith founded the university’s Solar Geoengineering Research Program in 2017, and he

A breakdown from nervous strain and overwork in 1869 left him incapacitated for nearly a year. Yet the headlong life resumed. The museum building was doubled in size. He embarked on still another venture, around Cape Horn to California with a Coast Survey expedition, and returned this time with some one hundred thousand specimens. And in the final

Allen said, “Then we ought to talk about what we can do for you.” “Design a nuclear bomb.” “Of course. Los Alamos may be a multidisciplinary institution, but I suspected you wouldn’t be here for any other reason. Can you give me any specifics? What type? What yield?” “The PDC will send you the completed technical requirements before long, so I’ll j

The central moral dilemma of our age, and of this very moment now, is the use or non-use of annihilating power. This choice was posed most cogently in fictional terms by the purest of fantasists.