APRICOT TREE UNDER THE LINEAR ACCELERATOR, LOS ALAMOS NATIONAL LABORATORY, NEW MEXICO 2004
Photograph by ©Craig Varjabedian  All Rights Reserved

This lone apricot tree sits along the truck route to the mesa-top site of Los Alamos, New Mexico. Most people are familiar with Los Alamos as the place where scientists such as Edward Teller, Robert Oppenheimer, Niels Bohr, and Richard Feynman worked during World War II on the Manhattan Project—the atomic bomb. One day in spring, however, as I was driving the road, I saw this thing—a flash of white, a snowball in the midst of the darkness. It was a beautiful little tree with its cascading lines of blossoms. It was made all the more curious and delightful to me because I knew what was on the cliff top above it: the Lab’s half-mile linear accelerator and neutron scattering center, known as LANSCE.

What’s going on at LANSCE is energy release, incredibly swift and powerful. I see the blooming apricot tree in a similar light. Compared with what happens at LANSCE, the energy release is gentler, but it is just as important. We humans can bombard atoms and split off neutrons to use for our own devices. But we have been constant witnesses to a more primal release of energy. We live surrounded by beams and waves of light, scents, textures, and colors—the generation and renewal of the natural world around us. Nature needs no human intervention. Its mystery continues, day in and day out, with its own cycle.