Like Oak Ridge, Argonne National Laboratory serves as a living witness to the continuity of American 20th century physics: after its first incarnation as part of the Manhattan Project’s Metallurgical Laboratory (the group that first successfully isolated Plutonium), it was the first research site to be designated a National Laboratory after the war. In the sixty-five years between some of the world’s first nuclear reactor research and today’s most cutting-edge accelerator development, there was hardly a science-and-technology subject in which Argonne didn’t have a hand.
This history is written all over the lab, even as it is already carving itself a place in the 21st century: