The Superlative Light: "they Bring the Stars to Earth!"; Inside the Texas Petawatt Laser

Robert Shults is based in Austin, Texas. His work has been included in exhibitions at The Print Center, Rangefinder Gallery, and The Camera Club of New York. His publication credits include The New Yorker, Slate, WIRED, Smithsonian, and The New York Times.

Todd Ditmire received his Ph.D. in physics from the University of California at Davis in 1995. He is currently a professor of physics at the University of Texas at Austin, where he is director of the Texas Center for High Intensity Laser Science and the Texas Petawatt Project. He was previously a staff scientist and project leader at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in California.

Rudy Rucker is a writer and a mathematician who worked for twenty years as a Silicon Valley computer science professor, and published a number of software packages. Rucker is regarded as contemporary master of science-fiction, and received the Philip K. Dick award twice. His thirty published books include both novels and non-fiction books on the fourth dimension, infinity, and the meaning of computation. A founder of the cyberpunk school of science-fiction, Rucker also writes SF in a realistic style known as transrealism. His 2006 Mathematicians in Love was an example of a transreal novel. His early cyberpunk four-book series was republished in 2010 as The Ware Tetralogy. Rucker's 2007 novel, Postsingular was something of a return to the cyberpunk style, as was the 2009 sequel, Hylozoic, in which every object on Earth comes to life. Rucker's autobiography, appeared in 2011. Recent novels include Jim and the Flims, Turing & Burroughs, and The Big Aha.