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9.1.2006 Journey to the Island of Stability

(running time 7:25)

Nuclear chemists are on a quest to make an extraordinary substance never before seen in the natural world. Listen in as MIT historian David Kaiser describes their long journey, which may soon reach its elusive goal.

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David Kaiser teaches physics and the history of science at MIT. He also conducts research on early-universe cosmology, blending ideas from particle physics and gravitation to try to understand how our universe has evolved from the smallest to the largest scales. Kaiser's latest book is Drawing Theories Apart: The Dispersion of Feynman Diagrams in Postwar Physics (University of Chicago Press, 2005).