From The New York Times:
There is physics. And then there is physics with music.
And so, when a new opera about the atomic bomb, of all things, opened to acclaim this month in San Francisco, I traveled across the bay from a conference in Berkeley. It has been 60 years since the atomic bomb emerged from its cradle at the Trinity test site in Alamogordo, N.M., to punctuate the end of World War II with a blinding flash and the cries of the burned in Hiroshima and Nagasaki. I am old enough to have emerged from that same cradle, fussing and complaining, old enough to have seen the Beatles and to have watched and felt the desert shake one cold loud morning in 1968 as one of those beasts went off and a radioactive dust ball drifted off toward Canada.
As an ex-physics major, sci-fi addict, science writer and lover of apocalypse, I long ago concluded that there was not much new to say about the atomic bomb. But I was wrong.
More here.