John Adamsa says his new opera Dr. Atomic is an attempt to reconnect us with history. “Every time you pick up a paper, turn on the TV or go on the internet, you’re presented with some huge human tragedy. It might be an Iraqi policeman blown apart, or somebody shot by a terrorist, but the way it’s presented in the media, it all just becomes so much data. The story of the development of the atomic bomb has become like a comic-book narrative: all these ingenious young American scientists building this bomb, and then setting it off in the desert, and then we drop it on the Japanese. We’ve heard this story so often that it doesn’t have any meaning any more. It’s just an event in our cosmic consciousness. It’s my job to make people feel the significance of the story again.”