59 ....

thats how many years its been since the first atom bomb Little Boy was dropped on Hiroshima ... and then three days later, Fat Man appeared in Nagasaki - thankfully, there has been nothing since ... touch wood! the early part of this century was supposed to be the golden age of physics - an era that can only perhaps be beaten by the days of Galileo and Newton in terms of the breakthroughs achieved about our understanding of this world - the so called Sturm und Drang period of quantum mechanics .....

the discovery and development of quantum mechanics as a key to the working of the world has been one of the greatest achievements of man, hopefully it wont be one of the most regrettable.

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on a brigher note, Manindra Agrawal and two of his students at IIT Kanpur, Neeraj Kayal and Nitin Saxena, put forth their new method of determining whether a number is prime or not. here is a link to their original paper that came out two years ago today ...