by SAM KEAN
Lawrence’s 60 inch cyclotron, with magnet poles 60 inches (5 feet, 1.5 meters) in diameter, at the University of California Lawrence Radiation Laboratory, Berkeley, in August, 1939 PHOTO/U.S. Department of Energy
Big Science: Ernest Lawrence and the Invention That Launched the Military-Industrial Complex by Michael Hiltzik (Simon and Schuster, 528 pp., $30)
Science is no longer the domain of solitary experimenters
In 1956, novelist Sybille Bedford mourned the passing of an era in physics—that age where “the laws of the universe were something a man might deal with pleasantly in a workshop set up behind the stables.” This was science as Newton and Darwin practiced it, a solitary genius matching wits with nature. No more. Nowadays, virtually all scientists collaborate, working in teams of three, four, a dozen others. A paper from a particle accelerator experiment or big genome project might include several thousand authors.
Ironically enough, as Michael Hiltzik explains in Big Science, this shift was itself largely the doing of a single genius. Ernest Lawrence is best known today for his 1931 invention of the cyclotron, a “proton merry-go-round” that accelerates subatomic particles, like protons, to high speeds. Located in the Radiation Lab at the University of California at Berkeley, where Lawrence conducted his experiments, the first cyclotron didn’t exactly scream Big Science—it was a mere 4.5 inches in diameter. But it proved remarkably effective for probing the structure of the atomic nucleus, which prompted Lawrence to build a larger model, at 11 inches. This proved still more effective, so he built a bigger one, and then a bigger one. Each new model—27 inches, 37 inches, 60 inches—gave Lawrence a glimpse of new vistas to explore. But the only way to do so was by building bigger and more expensive equipment.
Not that Lawrence considered this a problem. A tall, booming extrovert, he loved hobnobbing with university trustees and foundation presidents, and he wasn’t shy about asking them for gobsmacking amounts of money. Lawrence’s cyclotron eventually grew to 184 inches, and the budget for the Rad Lab swelled in lockstep, reaching millions of dollars per year. It took several dozen scientists to keep this behemoth running, and as Lawrence took on more and more assistants, his role shifted from scientist to professional manager—or as Hiltzik puts it, a professional ringleader, cheerleader, and science salesman.
Hiltzik, a business columnist for the Los Angeles Times, traces the birth of Big Science to this insatiable desire for bigger, better cyclotrons, and the scientific arms race that resulted. Although less lauded than, say, the revolutions of Copernicus and Darwin, the revolution that Lawrence initiated changed science in an equally important way, and as with any sea change, there’s much to admire and much to mourn. You can’t argue with the results, but Big Science forces modern researchers to spend most of their time writing grant proposals, managing personnel, and serving on committees—things the fabled gentleman-scientist working behind the stables of yore never had to worry about.
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