In April 1997, we circulated about 300 copies of this booklet throughout the United States and the rest of world. Comments came from teachers who taught all levels and also from nuclear scientists throughout the world. From these many excellent comments, we prepared a second version in the summer of 1997. During a week long summer workshop, sponsored by the American Physical Society (APS)-Division of Nuclear Physics, John Cramer, James O'Connell, Ken Krane, Margaret McMahan, Eric Norman, Karen Street and I, completely revised the previous version. Once again we circulated the manuscript and once again we received many excellent suggestions. We have tried to incorporate as many of these improvements as possible.

This teacher's guide is a work in progress. We welcome your advice and suggestions. Most important are responses that describe how useful you have found this guide for classroom use and what sections you used. We would like success stories as well as discussions of the problems that you have found. We have tried to edit this booklet as carefully as possible. Undoubtedly, there are sections that are too abstract, too abstruse, or perhaps misleading. There are still many typos. Your comments are essential to make the next edition even better. Please send them to

Howard Matis
MS 70-319
Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory
Berkeley, CA 94720

Teachers can reproduce this document for their classroom use as long as they include the title and copyright statement.

Many other people besides the authors contributed to the creation of this guide. Because of the large number of contributions, we have only been able to acknowledge only a few as authors. We thank the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, U.S. Department of Energy, the American Physical Society-Division of Nuclear Physics, and the J.M. Nitschke Fund for their support and encouragement in preparing this manuscript.

Howard Matis
for the Nuclear Wall Chart Committee

Berkeley, California
March 1998