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Booksignings
February 25, 2010 (Thursday)
6:00 PM
Join us on for a signing with George A. Cowan, author of Manhattan Project to the Santa Fe Institute, the Memoirs of George A. Cowan. Mr. Cowan will speak at the Bradbury Science Museum just before the signing, at 5:15 p.m.
 Cowan's memoir is an engaging eyewitness account of how science works and how scientists, as human beings, work as well. In discussing his career in nuclear physics from the 1940s into the 1980s, Cowan weaves in intriguing anecdotes about a large cast of distinguished scientists-all related in his wry, self-deprecating manner.
He writes of meeting Richard Feynman for the first time, in 1941. "I had been assigned to a very small office in the basement of the Palmer Physics Building, close to the cyclotron. I sat at a bare desk with only a telephone on it and stared at the empty shelves, estimating how many feet of books I would want to ship from home. Someone burst into the room, a rather tall, slim person with swept-back black hair. He stopped, obviously not expecting to find the room occupied. Then he said, 'May I use your phone?' I nodded. He whipped out a little screwdriver, quickly disassembled the phone, and left with a piece of it in his hand."
Besides his 39-year career at Los Alamos National Laboratory, Cowan also helped establish banks in Los Alamos and Santa Fe, served as treasurer of the group that created the Santa Fe Opera, and in the late 1980s participated in founding the Santa Fe Institute and served as its first president. He anchored its interdisciplinary work in his quest to find "common ground between the relatively simple world of natural science and the daily, messy world of human affairs."
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Since the early 1990s Cowan has pursued a new interest in psychology and neuroscience to gain a deeper understanding of patterns of human behavior. This autobiography will appeal to anyone interested in a concise, intellectually engaged account of science and its place in society and public policy over the past 70 years.
Cowan has also served on the White House council of science advisers. One of the world's experts on nuclear weapons diagnostics, Cowan received the Enrico Fermi Prize for "a lifetime of exceptional achievement in the development and use of energy," the E. O. Lawrence Award, the Robert H. Goddard Award, and the Los Alamos National Laboratory Medal, which honored his pioneering work in radiochemical techniques and his measurements of fundamental physical properties of neutrons from nuclear explosions. He is a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.
Upcoming
March 11, 2010
A double signing on March 11 at
6:00 p.m. will feature two talented
Los Alamos artists and authors, Darla Graff Thompson and Andi Kron.
Thompson, an artist and poet, has combined photos of her amazing sculptures (heads and busts, mostly) with insightful poems in a unique volume called erratic, ecstatic, et cetera. The collection is sure to provide the reader with some new ways of seeing, thinking, and feeling.
Kron's book, Freewheeling at 50 (with Charlie Thorn), takes us on the road with her for a multi-state bike trek she and her husband Charlie took to mark Andi's 50th birthday. Day-by-day accounts are supplemented with their photography. Known for her excellent cartography, this small book not only shows her stamina as a biker and traveller, but also her skill as a storyteller.
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