Physics has merit in new boy scouts program

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holds his BSA science merit badge in chemistry, was working with Boy Scouts visiting his lab when he was struck by how outdated their material was. As a member of the American Physical Society’s division of nuclear physics, he contacted the Boy Scouts and offered to help rewrite the booklet.

“The material they were using was based on the old atomic energy merit badge,” Matis said. “The old book had been rewritten many, many times over the years and it was confusing and more oriented toward industry, not science.” Working with a freelance writer, Matis, with the help of Rutgers University physicist Jolie Cizewski, designed a new book aimed at 13- to 17-year-olds who have not taken a physics course.

Prior to Matis’s reworking the book and helping design a new badge, about 3000 boys worked toward the badge each year. Since his first revision came out last year, the number has jumped to 5000. Matis finished another update a couple of months ago.

“It’s better than any high-school physics course for information on nuclear and particle physics,” he said. “It focuses on nuclear physics, but I got some quarks in it.” He also added a section on how to pursue a career as a physicist.

How hard is it to become an Eagle Scout? “It was harder than getting a PhD, at least for me,” Matis said. “There was this physical fitness requirement and I had to do three pull-ups. It took forever.”