It was just ahead of lunch when we arrived at the Hans Bethe House at the Los Alamos History Museum. Not surprisingly, much of the Los Alamos History Museum’s exhibits are devoted to its national laboratory, the designing of the first nuclear weapons, and the men and women who made it possible. 

The Bethe House was otherwise empty apart from my family, so the docent struck up a conversation when he saw me paying attention to Frederick Reine’s 1995 Nobel Prize in Physics on display. “I was one of his graduate assistants,” he told me, and our conversation began. [Read more…]