Jeremy Bernstein

An Inconvenient New Neutrino?

The Standard Model is a tight mathematical structure, with a specific symmetry, that simply does not allow for another neutrino. If these results from MiniBooNE prove correct, it will once again show just how odd neutrinos are.

How Iran Gets the Bomb

What happens if there is no agreement? Most experts estimate that it would be a matter of months before the Iranians built their first bomb. The degree of chaos and danger this would introduce to the Middle East region and beyond is hard to overstate.

Remembering Bob Silvers

On the late editor of The New York Review

Steven Weinberg and the Puzzle of Quantum Mechanics

Getting Nukes, or Not

As we enter what could be a new age of nuclear proliferation, which countries might succeed in getting a bomb and which might fail?

Spooky Physics Up Close: An Exchange

Great Scientists Against Terrible Odds

Walking Like a Black Hole

Iran's Hidden Threat

Critics of the deal over Iran’s nuclear program have done almost nothing to answer the most important questions: What has the nuclear deal actually achieved? And what are its potential shortcomings?

The Trump Bomb

The question of nuclear proliferation

North Korea's New Bomb

It is extremely unlikely that the nuclear device tested by North Korea on January 6 was a true hydrogen bomb. More likely, it was what is known as a “boosted device,” a kind of weapon light enough to fit on rockets, which the North Koreans have in abundance.

Byting the Apple

Einstein: Right and Wrong

Among the cosmological phenomena that the theory of relativity successfully predicted was one that Einstein could never accept: the existence of black holes. I don’t think he ever changed his mind.

Rouhani vs. Reality

Listening to the speeches that American President Barack Obama and Iranian President Hassan Rouhani each gave their nations about the nuclear agreement in Vienna, one has the impression that the two leaders are living in alternate universes.

Iran’s Nuclear Future

Could an underground nuclear facility in Iran become a powerhouse for neutrino research?

Los Alamos Declassified

A number of my physics teachers at Harvard had been at Los Alamos during the war and had essential parts in building the bomb. But none of them ever said anything about it, at least not to me.

When Einstein Was Wrong

A Nuclear Ukraine

What might have happened if Ukraine had kept at least part of its vast nuclear arsenal, as former prime minster Leonid Kuchma wanted?

Let’s Call the Whole Thing Off

Iran’s Plutonium Game

To anyone who has been following the Iranian nuclear program, it was almost a forgone conclusion that negotiations with Iran would hit a road block when it came to the so-called IR-40 heavy water reactor located in Arak.