“He reckoned the moiré cell itself would have one property that varied strictly with rotation angle, more or less independently of the details of the atoms that made it up. That property was a critical one: the amount of energy a free electron in the cell would have to gain or shed to tunnel between the two graphene sheets. That energy difference was usually enough to serve as a barrier to intersheet tunneling. But MacDonald calculated that as the rotation angle narrowed from a larger one, the tunneling energy would shrink, finally disappearing altogether at exactly 1.1 degrees.”
December 24, 1968
A clock recovered from Hiroshima that was destroyed during the atomic bombing frozen at the exact moment when the bomb exploded.
Katherine Hubbard
Julien Bismuth
The Snows of Churyumov-Gerasimenko on Comet 67P
“Contingency or randomness, gaps and blind spots are immanent features of formal systems, as they attempt to invent axioms and rules.”
Elliptical mirrors of the large Cherenkov counter at CERN
Rodrigo Valenzuela
David Noonan
Albums of photographs of electricity pylons in various countries →
Cassini's final image
Solar eclipse as seen from the moon
“The matador is gored; the shark breaks surface and wreaks havoc; a real of the type that I suggest we should embrace and celebrate punctures the screen or strip of film, destroying it: a real that happens, or forever threatens to do so, not as a result of the artist “getting it right” or overcoming inauthenticity, but rather as a radical and disastrous eruption within the always-and-irremediably inauthentic; a traumatic real; a real that’s linked to repetition; a real whose framework of comprehension is ultimately neither literary nor philosophical but psychoanalytic: the real that Lacan defines as “that which always returns to the same place” and as “that which is unassimilable by any system of representation.” The challenge, for the writer, would never be one of depicting this real realistically, or even “well”; but of approaching it in the full knowledge that, like some roving black hole, it represents (although that’s not the right word anymore) the point at which the writing’s entire project crumples and implodes.”