Flip open the new 95-page Boy Scouts of America booklet on the requirements to earn the nuclear science merit badge, and you are greeted almost immediately with the command, “Do the following.” The next four pages of numbered and lettered activities include such requirements as defining and explaining “ALARA, alpha particle, atom, background radiation, beta particle, contamination, curie and Becquerel, gamma ray, half-life. …” The list goes on. Turn to the next page and you are told to build an electroscope, place a radiation source inside, and “explain any difference seen.” If that sounds daunting, you can build a cloud chamber instead.
The booklet is largely the work of physicist and Eagle Scout Howard Matis, a staff scientist with Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory’s nuclear science division. Matis, who holds his BSA science merit badge in chemistry, was working with Boy Scouts visiting his lab when he was struck by how...
