Miscellany
Georges Cuvier, founder of the field of paleontology, wrote in 1812 that examination of the strata of the earth revealed “traces of revolutions.” He surmised, “Innumerable living beings have been the victims of these catastrophes; some have been destroyed by sudden inundations, others have been laid dry in consequence of the bottom of the seas being instantaneously elevated. Their races have become extinct and have left no memorial of them, except some small fragment which the naturalist can scarcely recognize.”
Miscellany
As he watched the mushroom cloud form at the first atomic-bomb test in July 1945, physicist J. Robert Oppenheimer recalled a line from the Bhagavad Gita: “Now I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds.”
Miscellany
At the thirteenth General Conference on Weights and Measures in 1967, one second was redefined as “the duration of 9,192,631,770 periods of the radiation corresponding to the transition between the two hyperfine levels of the ground state of the caesium-133 atom.” In April of this year, the National Institute of Standards and Technology in Boulder, Colorado, unveiled a new atomic clock to act as the United States’ primary time standard; it will not gain or lose a second in 300 million years.
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