How To Be Educated At The National Museum of Nuclear Science and History
The National Museum of Nuclear Science and History is both a place to find fear and hope. During your tour, you go from the history of the beginnings of Nuclear Science. The race during WWII to make the H bomb. The dropping of the Little Boy on Hiroshima. The arms race between the USA and Russian. But also are hopeful future of what Nuclear Power can mean to us.
The museum holds many artifacts of the cold war era. It exhibits hold the history and the future goals of Nuclear Power. It is enough to chill you to the bone on how close we came to total deduction on both sides over different points of views.
As I walked through the museum, the thing that was going through my mind was Sting’s song Russians. But also how many of the scientist that created the H Bomb were looking to help humanity not harm it.
But the boneyard in the back is one of my top places. I love seeing the old planes and the old bombs were not bad either.
The information that fills this build can take a while to go through or just be walked past but the history of Nuclear is as important to human kind as the ability to create fire.
Brief History
The beginning of Nuclear Power was the beginning of science of atomic radiation, atomic change, and nuclear fission. It started as far back as 1789 with the discovery of Uranium by Martin Klaproth. But the real beganing was when Wilhelm Rontgen discovered ionising radiation in 1895.
As the years passed, many different scientific persons would make small and large discoveries including Pierre and Marie Curie who named the activity ‘radioactivity’. Their daughter would continue to work in the field and make several major discoveries herself.
But it was the 1930’s that discoveries that would lead to splitting of the atom and the fission that it could cause really got the world excited. In the beginning, Pierre and Marie Curie were looking for ways to help society in the medical field with their experiments. But like all things, it is profit and wars that create the greatest discovers for both the good and the bad.
Books
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Madame Curie: A Biography is about Marie Curie who was the first women to gain world wide fame as a scientist and win two Nobel Prizes. Her and her husband would be the leading scientist in the beginning of Nuclear Power.
Pierre Curie was just as important a figure as they worked together to discovery items that would lead to the Nuclear Age.
Or take the short cut and read all about Marie and Pierre and their two daughter, Irene and Eve, with their son-in-law Frederic Joliot-Curie. As the family created a multi generation saga of strong willed scientific minded personalities that helped shape the world we live in.
The reason that I choose this family to highlight is because they helped bring discoveries and thought patterns which shaped those who created the H Bomb.