Welcome to The Black Hole - Ed Grothus' old supermarket and adjoining A-frame church piled deep with salvaged scientific equipment of all kinds. Of course this nerd's paradise is located in Los Alamos, NM. These great blue skies are typical. This shot was taken in February!

Here is Ed himself, going about his business and displaying fabulous nerd fashion sense :)

This is Blackie, the resident stray cat. Notice her full coat - a necessity when you live in an unheated supermaket! You can tell a person who has been to the Black Hole before because they have a jacket and a flashlight :)

Nyree (my wife and the personal hero of animals worldwide) and I are working with the local animal shelters to get Blackie spayed and vaccinated. It is much healthier for a cat to be vaccinated and not having kittens every spring! New Mexico is notoriously bad about animal overpopulation, so if you are looking for a pet, please consider adopting from The Espanola Animal Shelter.

Ed has begun quite a collection of items that survived the Cerro grande fire. It is interesting what remains when a house burns down - and how quickly the cast iron and steel rusts afterwards. Items here include a drill press, sewing machine, automotive springs, many tools and toolboxes, a compressor, and even a few cast iron frying pans.

Here id Ed's collection of piano sounding boards that have had thier pianos burnt from around them. An analogy for the post-cold-war scientific community of "device" designers? The nerd sees tons of cool old stuff, but the political and social questions raised by this place are perhaps much more powerful.

I have been watching some amateur railgun building efforts and hoping to find suitable power capacitors here. This is the biggest one I have seen so far. It is about 2 feet tall. I should have included something in the photo for scale. Unfortunately there are not specs or ratings printed on this beast, but the insulator would indicate extremely high voltage capacity. There are 2 like this.

This is Ed's screening room where he shows films that have been made about him and the Black Hole.