références

In the beach sands of Kerala, abraded from the gneiss, in the stream sands of North Carolina one finds monazite, the solitary mineral. In its crystalline beginning there was order, there was a lattice. And the atoms - cerium, lanthanum, thorium, yttrium, phosphate - danced round their predestined sites, tethered by the massless springs of electrostatics and by their neighbors’ bulk. They vibrated, and sang in quantized harmony. to absent listeners, to me. But the enemy is within. The radioactive thorium’s nervous nuclei explode in the random thrum of a hammer of no Norse god. The invisible searchlights of hell, gamma rays, flash down the lattice. Alpha particles, crazed nuclear debris, are thrust on megavolt missions of chance destruction. The remnant atom, transmuted, recoils, freeing itself from its lattice point, cannonballs awry through a crowded dance floor. There are no exits to run to. In chain collisions of disruption neighbors are knocked from their sites. The crystal swells from once limpid long-range, short-range order