The History Room at the B Reactor, part of Manhattan Project National Historical Park, walks visitors through a timeline of the scientific discoveries that led to the reactor. One of its panels is called "Scientific Curiosity."
The panel's message
Scientists are often driven by curiosity — the wish to learn, discover and answer questions. Chadwick, Meitner, Fermi, McMillan and Seaborg ran experiment after experiment until they had answers to the big questions that made the nuclear age possible.
It features three stories:
| Richard Feynman | intensely curious about the world from a young age, and a standout in mathematics. His Manhattan Project work included the calculations for the blast yield of a fission bomb. The panel's main image shows him lecturing in front of blackboards full of equations |
| Leona Woods Marshall Libby | the only woman scientist on the Chicago Pile-1 team, who went on to oversee the development of the first nuclear reactors at Hanford. A black-and-white photograph shows her in a white shirt, blazer and skirt |
| Hanford's lab workers | women and men in Hanford's laboratories ran the tests that supported plutonium production. A second photograph shows three women in white lab coats working side by side |
Your turn
The panel asks visitors what sparks their curiosity and makes them want to learn and experiment, and invites them to write the answer in a lab notebook — keeping any personal details general, such as just a first name and hometown.
Visiting
The B Reactor can be visited only on guided tours run by the Department of Energy.
Sources
Based on "B Reactor History Room: Scientific Curiosity," National Park Service; a work of the United States government in the public domain. The panel's photographs carry their own credits and are not reproduced.
In these publicationsManhattan Project National Historical Park
Licence: CC0 1.0 (public domain) · Adapted from www.nps.gov
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