Talk:Los Alamos National Laboratory

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

This article is part of WikiProject California, an attempt to build a comprehensive and detailed guide to California on Wikipedia. If you would like to participate, you can edit this article, or visit the project page to join the project and/or contribute to the discussion.

	This article is within the scope of the National Register of Historic Places WikiProject, a collaborative effort to improve Wikipedia's coverage of listings on the U.S. National Register of Historic Places. If you would like to participate, you can visit the project page, where you can join the project and see a list of open tasks.
???	This article has not yet received a rating on the assessment scale.

I propose that everything below "manhattan district be moved to History of the Manhattan Project jengod 22:12, Jan 30, 2004 (UTC)

---

I plan to over the next little while to delete the entire History section and start over. Here's why:

1. It's currently nothing much more than a slightly edited copy-and-paste from a historical essay written at the Los Alamos National Laboratory website, which is (c) the University of California, which clearly says that the material can be reproduced and distributed only without charge provided that the copyright notice and a statement of authorship are reproduced on all copies. I'm almost completely sure this violates the GNU Free Documentation License.

2. It has almost no information on the laboratory from 1945 until the present -- since the history pasted from LANL's site was only a retrospective of the events leading up to the first atomic bomb test, hence the entry makes it seem like Los Alamos stopped doing anything interesting in July of 1945! In reality they have been one of the most prominent members of the AEC/ERDA/DOE National Lab system from 1945 to the present, with lots of prominent work on the hydrogen bomb, anti-missile systems, computing, biology, nanotechnology, and so forth, plus a nice amount of scandals and espionage and other fun things. This needs to be reflected in the article; it cannot simply be a retelling of Los Alamos' role during the Manhattan Project. This should be done on the Manhattan Project page, and even there does not need this level of detail (someone looking for that much information can easily visit the LANL website or get a printed reference like Richard Rhodes' The Making of the Atomic Bomb).

This might take awhile and it might look very sad at first -- deleting a HUGE page and replacing it with likely a lot less -- but I think it is necessary and a good idea anyway. I myself feel confident that I could write a sparse but functional history of LANL which hopefully others could add to over time. Anyway I'll probably not start this for a few days so if anyone has any objections please post them here. --Fastfission 20:48, 14 Jun 2004 (UTC)

I think you misread the copyright notice at lanl - it said technical and scientific information were copyright University of California - which does not apply to the document used. It does require that the copyright notice be included with copies (I am not sure how this might apply to derivative works) and any statements of authorship - but the documents which have been used did not include any statements of authorship, so that is not a problem. Anyway this doesn't matter much, since you will be rewriting the history section anyway, which is great. But if you want to keep any of the original article I think we could do it fairly, and should add a link to the original article in either case to make the full information more available to the reader. I'll check in on the article and try to give you some feedback as you begin reworking the material - good luck. Trelvis 15:31, Jun 15, 2004 (UTC)

Well, I don't think I misread the copyright statement, but anyway it doesn't matter a whole lot and is not worth debating. :) (I'm pretty sure the "All information" applies to this, and that it still requires the copyright notice and that distribution be done without charge, both of which violate the GNU FDL if I understand it correctly) --Fastfission 16:40, 15 Jun 2004 (UTC)

Contents 1 Additional thoughts 2 Disambiguation 3 Time to actually do something 4 War restrictions

[edit] Additional thoughts

It would be a good idea to mention or link to the Los Alamos Museum. I seem to recall, that Los Alamos has one of the highest church per capita ratios in the US. If this is true, it would be worth mentioning. -- Solipsist 22:10, 19 Sep 2004 (UTC)

[edit] Disambiguation

Los Alamos currently redirects to this page. There are also Los Alamos place names, so instead of a redirect there should be a disambiguation page. Willmcw 21:40, 16 Nov 2004 (UTC)

[edit] Time to actually do something

If no one objects, I'm going to remove the mentioned section tonight. There was some discussion of this the better part of a year ago, but nothing was done. Maury 13:05, 22 Nov 2004 (UTC)

[edit] War restrictions

Does anyone know what kind of restrictions were put on civilians travelling to or working in Los Alamos during WWII and the cold war? Could Los Alamos fit the description of a "Closed city"? Seabhcán 11:00, 6 Jun 2005 (UTC)

Since the Closed city article specifically defines them as being in the Soviet Union, I would have to say probably not. :-) However, access to the town was restricted well into the 1950s, so the analogy isn't bad. Bill-on-the-Hill 00:50, 8 September 2005 (UTC)

They were thought to be pretty loose if you go by books such as Brotherhood of the Bomb by Gregg Herken CaseyCastle 00:13, 26 May 2006 (UTC)