4,850 feet beneath the Black Hills of South Dakota, there’s an underground particle accelerator in a former gold mine. Here, a motorcycle-riding nuclear astrophysicist named Mark Hanhardt thinks about the poetry of Alfred Tennyson while recreating the quantum alchemy of a 13-billion-year-old star.
Pictures from the James Webb Space Telescope contain a glint of what its eye can not yet see, an ancient spectrum of light that Hanhardt peers into with his team. Here, he maps the primordial chemical lineage of the universe back to the Big Bang. Here, with a poem, his doctoral thesis begins:
