Thanks for that, Mr. Kukla. I plan to forward it to some old colleagues from Jefferson Lab, the national nuclear physics accelerator laboratory in Newport News. Many of the scientists who arrived circa 1986 and later came from well beyond Virginia, notably Berkeley, and I remember occasional conjecturing about Jefferson and serpentine walls, of which there are a few within a short radius of the lab. A collateral duty that I had was to study what in TJ’s technoscience experience and interest could justify applying his name to that laboratory. (I was a writer and editor, and when the Jefferson name was adopted in 1996, I mentioned to the chief scientist that people would want to know. He said, You’re right, so go study that for us. It was a license to study history on company time.) There’s a lot of justification, it turns out. But I never happened across the answer about TJ and those walls.

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