I'm guessing you've heard (maybe even understood) Feynman's Lost Lecture, the '64 motion-of-the-planets explanation delivered to Caltech freshman. I got lost early, but it's great to listen to this genius with the bricklayer's voice.

I was just looking at Taylor's web page. He's into disarmament stuff these days.

RE the Los Alamos guys: Richard Feynman and Freeman Dyson's made a road trip from Cornell to Albuquerqe (sp?), in the late 40s. Judging from Dyson's letters home (printed in From Eros to Gaia) what a long strange trip it was. I figure if time travel existed, the route would have been lined with hitchhikers hoping to get a ride and eavesdrop on the conversation.

If I remember right, John McPhee's "Curve of Binding Energy" went into detail about Ted Taylor, a colleague of Freeman's. Ted was interested in an apparatus that would dispense small nuclear gadgets like cans out of a soda machine. What the spacecraft required was, to put it mildly, a pretty stiff shock absorber behind the cabin. Ted was also musing on a way to tunnel mines using nuclear bombs. Something about coating half the inner shell with some kind of graphite blah blah that would direct a clean, two-mile tunnel in one blast. Them Los Alamos guys, they must've been fun to drink with.