Big Science

Ernest Lawrence and the Invention that Launched the Military-Industrial Complex

Michael Hiltzik

• Publisher: Simon & Schuster
• Year: 2015
• Print ISBN: 9781451675764
• eBook ISBN: 9781451676037
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Science & Technology Biographies
• Index: History

The epic story of how science went "big" and the forgotten genius who started it all—"entertaining, thoroughly researched…partly a biography, partly an account of the influence of Ernest Lawrence's great idea, partly a short history of nuclear physics and the Bomb" ( The Wall Street Journal ). Since the 1930s, the scale of scientific endeavor has grown exponentially. The first particle accelerator could be held in its creator's lap, while its successor grew to seventeen miles in circumference and cost ten billion dollars. We have invented the atomic bomb, put man on the moon, and probed the inner workings of nature at the scale of subatomic particles—all the result of Big Science, the model of industrial-scale research paid for by governments, departments of defense, and corporations that has driven the great scientific projects of our time.The birth of Big Science can be traced nearly nine decades ago in Berkeley, California, when a young scientist with a talent for physics declared, "I'm going to be famous!" His name was Ernest Orlando Lawrence. His invention, the cyclotron, would revolutionize nuclear physics, but that was only the beginning of its impact, which would be felt in academia, industry, and international politics. It was the beginning of Big Science."An exciting book….A bright narrative that captures the wonder of nuclear physics without flying off into a physics Neverland…. Big Science is an excellent summary of how physics became nuclear and changed the world" ( The Plain Dealer, Cleveland). This is the "absorbing and expansive" ( Los Angeles Times ) story that is "important for understanding how science and politics entwine in the United States…with striking details and revealing quotations" ( The New York Times Book Review ).

Part One

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THE MACHINE

Chapter One

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A Heroic Time

Ernest Rutherford was one of science’s Great Men, a towering figure who drove developments in his era rather than riding in the wakes of others. To an acquaintance who observed, “You’re always at the crest of the wave,” he was said to have replied: “Well, after all, I made the wave, didn’t I?” He was loud, with a boisterous laugh and a hearty appreciation of what was known in his time as “smoking-room humor.” C. P. Snow, a youthful associate of Rutherford’s who would win literary fame with novels set in the corridors of academia and government, remembered Lord Rutherford as “a big, rather clumsy man, with a substantial bay window that started in the middle of the chest” and “large staring blue eyes and a damp and pendulous lower lip.”

Born in 1871 to a handyman and his wife in New Zealand when it was a remote outpost of the British Empire, Rutherford became an intuitive theorist and the preeminent experimental physicist of his age. No one could question his talent for divining the significance of the results produced by his elegant handmade equipment. “Rutherford was an artist,” commented his former student A. S. Russell. “All his experiments had style.”

Rutherford was twenty-four when he first came to Cambridge University’s storied Cavendish Laboratory on a graduate scholarship. It was 1895, a fortuitous moment when physicists were pondering a host of strange new physical forces manifested in their apparatuses. Only a month before Rutherford’s arrival, the German physicist Wilhelm Roentgen had reported that a certain electrical discharge generated radiation so penetrating it could produce an image of the bones of a human hand on a photographic plate. Roentgen called his discovery X-rays.

Roentgen’s report prompted the Parisian physicist Henri Becquerel to look for other signs of X-rays. His technique was to expose a variety of chemical compounds to energizing sunlight. He would seal a photographic plate in black paper, cover the paper with a layer of the candidate compound, place the arrangement under the sun, and check back later to see if a shadow appeared on the sealed plate. During a stretch of overcast Paris weather in February 1896, he shut away in a drawer his latest preparation: a uranium salt sprinkled over the wrapped plate, awaiting the sun’s reemergence from behind the clouds. When he developed the plate, he discovered it had been spontaneously exposed by the uranium in the darkened drawer.

Marie Curie and her husband, Pierre, soon established in their own Paris laboratory that Becquerel’s rays were produced naturally by certain elements, including two that they had discovered and named polonium, in honor of Marie Curie’s native Poland, and radium. They called the phenomenon “radioactivity.” (Becquerel and the Curies would share the 1903 Nobel Prize for their work on what was originally called “Becquerel radiation.”)

Other scientists launched parallel inquiries to unravel the mysteries lurking within the atom’s interior. Cavendish director Joseph John “J. J.” Thomson, Ernest Rutherford’s mentor, discovered the electron in 1897, thereby establishing that atoms were divisible into even smaller particles—“corpuscles,” he called them. Thomson proposed a structural model for the atom in which his negatively charged electrons were suspended within an undifferentiated positively charged mass, like bits of fruit within a soft custard. Irresistibly, this became known as the “plum pudding” model. It would prevail for fourteen years, until Rutherford laid it to rest.

Rutherford, meanwhile, had busied himself examining “uranium radiation,” his term for the emanations discovered by Becquerel. In 1899 he determined that it comprised two distinct types of emissions, which he categorized by their penetrative power: alpha radiation was easily blocked by sheets of aluminum, tin, or brass; beta rays, the more potent, passed easily through copper, aluminum, other light metals, and glass. Rutherford had relocated to Montreal and a professorship at McGill University, which featured a lavishly equipped laboratory funded by a Canadian businessman, in an early example of scientific patronage by industry. Working with a gifted assistant named Frederick Soddy, who would coin the term isotope for structurally distinct but chemically identical forms of the same element, Rutherford determined that the radioactivity of heavy elements such as uranium, thorium, and radium was produced by decay, a natural transmutation that changed them by steps—in some cases, after minutes; in others, centuries, years, or millennia—into radioactively inert lead. Eventually alpha rays were identified as helium atoms stripped of their electrons—that is, helium nuclei—and beta rays as energetic electrons. The work earned Rutherford the 1908 Nobel Prize in chemistry. By then, he had already returned to Britain to take up a professorship at the University of Manchester.

There he would make an even greater mark on science by taking on the core question of atomic structure. “I was brought up to look at the atom as a nice hard fellow, red or grey in color, according to taste,” he remarked years later of the plum pudding model. But although he speculated that the atom was mostly empty space rather than a homogenous mass speckled with charged nuggets, he had not yet conceived an alternative model. With two Manchester graduate assistants, Hans Geiger and Ernest Marsden, he set about finding one, using alpha particles as his tools. As he knew, these were deflected somewhat by magnetic fields but, curiously, even more on their passage through solid matter—even through a thin film such as mica. This suggested that the atomic interior was an electromagnetic maelstrom buffeting the particle on his journey, not a serene, solid pudding.

Rutherford experimented by bombarding gold foils with alpha particles emanating from a glass vial of purified radium. Geiger and Marsden recorded the particles’ scattering by observing the flash, or scintillation, produced whenever one struck a glass plate coated with zinc sulfide. This apparatus displayed Rutherford’s hallmark simplicity and style, but the procedure was unspeakably onerous. The observer first had to sit in the unlighted laboratory for up to an hour to adjust his eyes to the dark, and then could observe only for a minute at a time because the strain of peering at the screen through a microscope tended to produce imagined scintillations mixed with the real ones. (Geiger eventually invented his namesake particle counter to relieve experimenters of the tedium.)

The experiment showed that most of the alpha particles passed through the foil with very slight deflection or none at all. But a tiny number—about one in eight thousand—bounced back at a sharp angle, some even ricocheting directly back at the source.

Rutherford was astonished by the results. “It was almost as incredible as if you fired a fifteen-inch shell at a piece of tissue paper, and it came back and hit you,” he would relate years later, creating one of the most cherished images in the history of nuclear physics. It was not hard for him to understand what had happened, for the phenomenon could be explained only if the atom was mostly empty space, with almost all of its mass concentrated within a single minuscule, charged kernel. The deflections occurred only when the alpha particle happened to strike this kernel directly or come close enough to be deflected by its electric charge. The kernel, Rutherford concluded, was the atomic nucleus.

Rutherford’s discovery revolutionized physicists’ model of the atom. But it was by no means his ultimate achievement. That came in 1919, he reported an even more startling phenomenon than the tissue-paper ricochets of 1911.

Rutherford had again relocated, this time to Cambridge, where he assumed the directorship of the Cavendish. The laboratory had opened in 1874 under the directorship of James Clerk Maxwell, who was a relative unknown at the time of his appointment; within a few short years, however, he had published the work on electricity and magnetism that made his worldwide reputation and established the Cavendish by association as one of Europe’s leading scientific centers. Maxwell’s conceptualization of electricity and magnetism as aspects of the same phenomenon, electromagnetism, would stand as the bridge between the classical physics of Sir Isaac Newton and the relativistic world of Albert Einstein, and his Cavendish would reign as the living repository of the British experimental tradition in physics.

In Rutherford’s time, the Cavendish reveled in its tatty grandeur, the epitome of small science in an institutional setting. The building was shaped like an L around a small courtyard: three stories on the long side, the top floor, with its gabled windows, crammed under a steeply raked roof. Inside the building were a single large laboratory and a smaller lab for the “professor,” a room for experimental equipment, and a lecture theater. There Rutherford held forth three times a week to an audience of about forty students, occasionally consulting a few loose pages of notes drawn from the inside pocket of his coat. Physicist Mark Oliphant, arriving at the Cavendish from Australia in the mid-1920s, remarked on its “uncarpeted floor boards, dingy varnished pine doors and stained plaster walls, indifferently lit by a skylight with dirty glass.” As for the director, he described Rutherford as “a large, rather florid man, with thinning fair hair and a large moustache, who reminded me forcibly of the keeper of the general store and post office.” The lab adhered strictly to the European “gentlemen’s tradition” of closing its doors for the night at six o’clock regardless of whether any experiments were in progress, with an elderly timekeeper assigned to glower at the lab bench of any scientist still working, rattling the lab keys to remind him of the time. Working late was considered “bad taste, bad form, bad science.”

The Cavendish treasured its history of having made great strides with scanty resources. Its entire annual budget was about £2,000, worth about $80,000 in twenty-first-century US currency and meager even in the old days for the magnitude of its work. What took up the slack was the shrewdness and craft of Rutherford’s associates, their ability to extract the maximum results from experimental apparatus of marked simplicity and elegance. The 1919 experiments would exemplify the Rutherford style.

Working with James Chadwick, whose experimental skills matched his own, Rutherford trained his alpha particles on a series of gaseous targets: oxygen, carbon dioxide, even ordinary air. With their apparatus, a refinement of the Marsden-Geiger box of 1911, they found that ordinary air produced especially frequent scintillations resembling those of hydrogen nuclei, or protons. Rutherford surmised correctly that the phenomenon was related to the 80 percent concentration of nitrogen in the air.

“We must conclude,” he wrote, “that the nitrogen atom is disintegrated . . . in a close collision with a swift alpha particle, and that the hydrogen atom which is liberated formed a constituent part of the nitrogen nucleus.” These circumspect words produced a scientific earthquake, for what Rutherford described was the first artificial splitting of the atom. It would eventually be recognized that the reaction entailed the absorption of the alpha’s two protons and two neutrons by the nitrogen nucleus—seven protons and seven neutrons—followed by the ejection of a single proton, thereby transmuting nitrogen-14 into the isotope oxygen-17. But what really set the world of science on a new path was the vision that Rutherford set forth at the close of his paper. “The results as a whole,” he wrote, “suggest that if alpha particles—or similar projectiles—of still greater energy were available for experiment, we might expect to break down the nucleus structure of many of the lighter atoms.”

In other words, alpha particles produced naturally by radium and polonium had exhausted their usefulness as probes of the nucleus. They simply weren’t powerful enough. Some way had to be found to impart greater energies to the projectiles: man’s cunning had to augment nature’s gifts to create a new kind of nuclear probe. Rutherford had drawn a road map for the future of nuclear physics. Off in the distant horizon lay the reality that the task of reaching the necessary energies would overmatch the elegant bench science of Rutherford’s generation.

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Rutherford’s discoveries launched a surge of ingenuity in physics. J. Robert Oppenheimer would later describe this as “a heroic time,” not merely because of the intellectual energy focused on the challenge Rutherford posed but because the work took place in an atmosphere of intellectual crisis. Physicists were forced to confront astonishing paradoxes roiling their conception of the natural world. Through much of the 1920s, they were wracked with doubt that they would be able to resolve them at all.

The words of eminent physicists of the era bristle with intellectual despair. The German physicist Max Born, one of the earliest disciples of the new theory of quantum mechanics, wrote in 1923 that its multiplying contradictions could mean only that “the whole system of concepts of physics must be reconstructed from the ground up.” The Viennese theorist Wolfgang Pauli, who combined rigorous intellectual integrity with an acerbic tongue—his famous critique of a sloppily argued paper was that it was “not even wrong”—lamented in 1925 that physics had become so “decidedly confused” that “I wish I . . . had never heard of it.” Even the level-headed James Chadwick recalled experiments at the Cavendish “so desperate, so far-fetched as to belong to the days of alchemy.”

Despite the complexity of their quest—or perhaps because of it—their work enthralled the public. For laypersons in the twenties, physics was invested with an aura of drama, even romance. The postwar decade had begun with Sir Arthur Eddington’s spectacular confirmation of Einstein’s theory of relativity at a joint meeting of the Royal Society and Royal Astronomical Society in November 1919. “Revolution in Science / New Theory of the Universe / Newtonian Ideas Overthrown” declared the Times of London in a historic headline. Eddington’s painstaking publicity campaign launched the theory of relativity into popular culture and its father, Albert Einstein, into a life of international renown. But that only whetted the public’s appetite for news about the search for the fundamental truths of nature, while fostering the image of modern physicists as intrepid individuals given to collect their data by trekking to the ends of the earth—as Eddington had journeyed to the far-off African island of Príncipe to witness a relativity-confirming eclipse.

Newspaper editors evinced a voracious appetite for news of the latest breakthroughs. Scientists became celebrities. In 1921 a six-week tour of the United States by Marie Curie and her two daughters, Eve and Irène, inspired outbursts of public admiration. The visit was the brainchild of Mrs. Marie Mattingly Meloney, a New York socialite and magazine entrepreneur who had been shocked to learn that Madame Curie’s research was hobbled by a meager supply of radium. Meloney conceived the idea of raising $100,000 to acquire a gram of the precious mineral—about as much as would fit in a thimble—and bringing Curie to America by steamship to accept the gift. “Mme. Curie Plans to End All Cancers,” declared the front page of the New York Times on the morning after her arrival (a bald assertion that the newspaper quietly retracted the following day). The climax of Madame Curie’s visit was a glittering reception at the White House attended by Meloney and the cream of Washington society, including Theodore Roosevelt’s socialite daughter Alice Roosevelt Longworth. There Marie Curie received the beribboned vial of radium directly from the hands of President Warren Harding, after which she expressed her gratitude (the New York Times reported) “in broken English.” Such were the demands of fund-raising even in the era of small science.

The public came to imagine that physics held the key to all phenomena of the natural world, including the chemical and the biological. Wrote Rutherford’s biographer, Arthur S. Eve, physicists were “endeavoring, with some initial success, to explain all physical and chemical processes in terms of positive electrons, negative electrons, and of the effects produced by these in the ether.” If they were right, he observed, “such phenomena as heredity and memory and intelligence, and our ideas of morality and religion . . . are explainable in terms of positive and negative electrons and ether.”

Not all the physicists were quite so confident. As the decade wore on and they delved more deeply into the intricacies of atomic structure, their picture of the natural world grew only murkier. Their perplexity stemmed from two related and equally perplexing phenomena. One was the so-called wave-particle duality of nature at the infinitesimal scale: experiments sometimes showed light and electrons behaving like particles, and other times as waves.

Einstein’s earlier pathbreaking work on the photoelectric effect suggested strongly that light was composed of a stream of “light quanta,” or particles. But he acknowledged that manifestations such as diffraction, interference, and scattering were inescapably wavelike. Instead of reconciling these contradictory observations, he had laid the issue before his colleagues. “It is my opinion,” he declared at a scientific convocation in Salzburg, Germany, in 1909, “that the next phase of the development of theoretical physics will bring us a theory of light that can be interpreted as a kind of fusion of the wave and mission [that is, particle] theories.”

Physicists grappled with the mysteries of subatomic behavior into the mid-1920s, hoping that the steady accretion of observed results would lead them to the truth. But the opposite was the case: the more data they acquired, the less they seemed to know for certain. “The very strange situation was that by coming nearer and nearer to the solution,” reflected the promising young German theoretical physicist Werner Heisenberg, “the paradoxes became worse and worse.” The only answer seemed to be the one proposed as a joke by the British physicist Sir William Bragg: “God runs electromagnetics on Monday, Wednesday, and Friday by the wave theory; and the devil runs them by quantum theory on Tuesday, Thursday, and Saturday.”

It would be Heisenberg and his mentor, the soft-spoken but rigorously logical Dane Niels Bohr, who finally divined the solution, in a process Heisenberg likened to watching an object emerge from a thick fog. Their conclusion was that anything one could know about an event taking place at a quantum scale was limited to what one could observe—and this knowledge depended on the means of observation. In other words, if one used equipment designed to examine electrons as particles, they would appear to behave as particles; if one used equipment best suited for detecting wave...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Dedication
• Introduction: Creation and Destruction
• Part One: The Machine
• Part Two: The Laboratory
• Part Three: The Bombs
• Epilogue: The Twilight of Big Science?
• Photographs
• Acknowledgments
• About Michael Hiltzik
• Bibliography
• Notes
• Index
• Photography Credits
• Copyright