In an instant, the bomb obliterated everything.
The tower it sat on and the copper wires strung around it: vaporized. The desert sand below: melted.
In the aftermath of the first test of an atomic bomb, in July 1945, all this debris fused together, leaving the ground of the New Mexico test site coated with a glassy substance now called trinitite. High temperatures and pressures helped forge an unusual structure within one piece of trinitite, in a grain of the material just 10 micrometers across — a bit longer than a red blood cell.
That grain contains a rare form of matter called a quasicrystal, born the moment the
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