Date/Time
Thursday
5 Nov 2026
4:00 pm - 5:30 pm
Location
470 Stephens Hall
Event Type
Colloquium
Dmitri Brown
Assistant Professor of History, UC Berkeley
On their days off, scientists stationed at Los Alamos during and after the Manhattan Project took walks through the mountains, mesas, and canyons of the Pajarito Plateau. Scientific and engineering problems lingered as they followed carved trails—footholds and handholds worn into the rock by generations of ancestral Pueblo people. On one of these walks, the young physicist Richard Feynman received a piece of advice from his mentor, John von Neumann: “You don’t have to be responsible for the world you’re in.” Tracing this line through multiple contexts, we gain insight into the relationship between science, place, and the meaning of the atomic age in the Tewa Pueblo world.
