Today, the 6th of August, marks 60 years since the first combat use of an atomic bomb over Hiroshima. 3 days later, on the 9th, another nuclear weapon was dropped on Nagasaki (little known fact: the original target was the city of Kokura, but it was covered with clouds, preventing from the aircraft from aiming the bomb. So the bomber proceeded to Nagasaki instead). These strikes precipitated the Japanese surrender less than a week later.

As a physicist, I regard the beginning of the nuclear age as a loss of innocence for physics... the entire Manhattan project which created the atom bomb involved countless physicists, many of them already well-established (like Fermi, Oppenheimer, Bethe etc) and others who would eventually go on to become Nobel-prize winners in their respective fields, like Feynmann and Segre. So in a sense, my intellectual predecessors were responsible for opening this Pandora's box, and I am personally fascinated by the history of this effort, which had its beginnings with the discovery of radioactivity in the late 19th century, at the end of the steam age.

It was also this moment when physicists went from being detached boffins to becoming a strategic resource...the nation with the most physicists would hold the key to power (this is of course not as simplistic, but certainly it must have seemed so in the immediate aftermath of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Billions of dollars were poured into physics research, a lot of it directly into nuclear weapons development, but much of it had very tenuous links, like particle physics and space research. For scientists in the US and Soviet Union, making vague, indirect links to weapons programmes used to be a useful way to get research funding (a project with the word 'nuclear' or 'atomic' in it doesn't necessarily have much to do with nuclear weapons or energy at all).

I have been to Hiroshima some years back, and it was quite a harrowing experience; the Peace Park is such a serene and beautiful place, until you realise that before the bombing it was a densely populated slum. I dearly wish Nagasaki is the last time anyone ever uses the bomb, but... I think the decision to drop the bombs was the right thing to do.

Japan was being blockaded by mid-1945, most of its navy on the bottom and its army beaten back from across the Pacific, but there was still an absolute refusal to surrender unconditionally (the military elite were only hoping for a conditional 'surrender' which would mean, among other things, that no occupation troops were to touch mainland Japan and most of the existing power structures would remain intact).

It was intended that in the event of an Allied invasion of mainland Japan, every man, woman and child would fight to the death. This was no idle threat: in the battle of Iwo Jima, the Japanese residents (including elderly and children) there had flung themselves off a cliff rather than be captured by American troops. So if the invasion had occured, in addition to massive combat casualties on both the Allied and Japanese sides, huge numbers of Japanese civillians were likely to have perished as well. A million Japanese combat troops were still stationed in China/Manchuria, and they would have provided a huge fight for the Allies, as well as continuing the brutal oppression of the occupied Chinese.

So, I believe that in the cold arithmetic of war, the use of atomic weapons was a tragic, but necessary decision.

On Tuesday evening, I was working overtime at the office when suddenly I received a phone call from home. My mum had just called me on the weekend, so it was unusual for her to call again so soon. She asked me what I was doing, if I had dinner etc., which was what she always starts off with whenever she calls me. A few minutes into the conversation, she suddenly said, 'Your eldest aunt's husband just passed away yesterday.' (We were talking in Mandarin, and it's a bit less awkward sounding it seems in English). This came as a total shock to me; I knew he had been ill for the past few years and he had to have major liver surgery last year, but there was no indication that he was critically ill. He wasn't the first family member to have passed away in my recent memory, but yet I felt a sadness that I haven't felt previously, and tears started welling up.

When I was a baby, my parents left me under the care of my father's eldest sister as my mother wanted to keep working; I only went back home with my parents in the weekends. Thus, I spent the first two years of my life in that house with my aunt's family, until my sister was born and my mother decided to quit work. There is hardly anything I remember from that period of infancy, but my parents tell me that my aunt's husband was very fond of me when I was staying in his house, and I used to cry whenever my parents came at the weekend to bring me home.

Years later, when I was about 4-6 years old, when my family went to visit this aunt, or when we were all at my grandmother's house, I would insist on staying overnight at my aunt's house... I still have memories from this part of my life, squeezing into bed with my cousins (they were 6-7 years older than me, and as I was my parents' eldest child, I regarded them as older brothers), and digging for toys in the musty dust-filled storeroom. I remember clambering up the shelves in the living room,looking for things I could play with.

After I was past 8 years old or so, my bond to my aunt's family waned... memories from my infancy and early childhood faded as I grew up, and I've hardly spoken to my cousins or their father since then. Still, I continued feeling a strong, unspoken, affinity to my aunt and her family. Whenever my family went to visit their house, I would somehow feel very much at home as every corner carried echoes of my early years. The cabinets which I had climbed up as a child now seemed so very small, yet so comfortingly familiar.

In the past decade, I must have not spoken directly to my aunt's husband except for greeting him (in part because I'm not very fluent in my supposedly native Hokkien language, and because the generation gap is so huge), yet went my mother told me he had passed away, I started crying (I have tears in my eyes as I write this). Maybe it's because he was present in some of the happiest memories of my life, and with his passing I seemed to have lost another link to my childhood.

I have not said anything about what sort of person he was, but on a level it doesn't matter. All my personal reminiscences of him have now regressed beneath the level of my conscious memory, and the emotion I felt at his passing is coming from a little boy who still lurks somewhere within my subconscious. Yet, I have one very vivid memory of him: I must have been 6 or 7, and my family was visiting his house. At that age, he seemed so towering, and he picked him up and swung me around as I squealed and laughed. In that brief moment, I was flying.

I have no other memories of anyone ever doing that to me.

So far, work has been good. I met Joss, my supervisor on Tuesday. He had just returned from a couple of months in Europe on Sunday, and he was too jet lagged to come into work on Monday. Joss is actually an Englishman, and he had presumably brought his family back to UK/Europe for vacation.

Joss is a very nice person, and in fact one of the most charismatic people I've met. He is effervescencely enthusiastic about the project we'll be doing (more on this later...). He might have noticed that I seemed rather glum most of the time.... but whenever I'm with someone who is very animated, I tend to be quite 'down', as if their friendliness is pushing me down. Or is it a natural suspicion towards people who are friendly towards me for no reason? He was also praising me a lot even on my first day at work, which made me feel a bit more unconfortable.... I tend to get uncomfortable when I get praised which I do not feel is warranted. I once had a friend who said that she liked praising people because it made her feel good...maybe he's like that as well. Personally, I feel that praise is devalued if it's given out too liberally.

Still, work is nice. The AAO shares is in the same compound as the Australian Telescope National Facility (which deals with radio telescopes...while the AAO operates optical/IR telescopes, and most of the buildings here actually belong to the ATNF. The ATNF also runs a lodge where visitors can stay, and this is where I'm staying. The other two summer students in this programme, Sam from Yorkshire and Pablo from Valencia (Spain), are also staying in my place. The rooms are en-suite, and the lodge is very well equipped, with a nice kitchen, free laundry facilities and TV lounge, and I'm basically paying hostel prices for this, so I have plenty of money to spend on other things.

I just went to downtown Sydney last weekend, and my pics of the harsh Sydney winter are here...