Big Science: Chapters 6–10

The strongest complaint came from the Macy Foundation’s Ludwig Kast, who fretted to Howard Poillon that if the WPA were overturned by the Supreme Court as “subversive to the spirit of the Constitution,” public disclosure of the WPA’s support of a Macy grantee might suggest “that we have something to do with sinister communistic tendencies.”

Harold Urey, a Berkeley chemistry PhD working at Columbia, had set out to identify a heavy isotope of hydrogen that had been postulated by Raymond Birge, among others.

Lewis was so confident of his process that he was profligate with what was still a rare substance.

Niels Bohr, who had so fulsomely lauded Lawrence at Caltech, now backed his friend and student Heisenberg, positing that even if the deuton did split after entering a target nucleus, the speed and range of the ejected proton would increase with the weight of the target—not remain constant, as Lawrence had found.

He was not assuaged by the more charitable opinion of his superior, Rutherford, who was delighted with Lawrence’s spirit in defending his results.

For the moment, Chadwick’s scorn, sounding as it did from deep within the bastion of small science, rankled deeply.

Perhaps he had become frustrated watching his boyhood chum collect accolades and public acclaim for his marvelous engineering while complacently performing atrocious physics.

Their years of partnership had given Sproul plenty of opportunities to size up Ernest as someone for whom the latitude to conduct research with appropriate resources and administrative encouragement vastly outweighed mundane matters such as salary and institutional prestige; Ernest’s interest was in making science, not necessarily himself, bigger.

Those mild words failed to do justice to the bitterness of the discussion, which included intemperate attempts by both sides to discredit each other; at one point, Raymond Birge, the easygoing Berkeley physics chairman, had to physically separate Lawrence and Tuve and calm their inflamed feelings.

They had bombarded dozens of elements with deuterons and assiduously tracked emissions of alpha particles during the bombardments; but the continued emission of electrons or positrons after the bombardments ended had escaped their notice.

This rather deliberate elision of Fermi’s role in neutron research was the prelude to a pitch for $2,250 “to increase the yield of neutron radiation tenfold or more.”

“I know how repugnant it is for any right-thinking scientist to become embroiled in a discussion concerning priority of discovery,” he wrote, “especially if material matters [in other words, money] enter into the picture.”

The cost of cyclotrons already was raising the hackles of academic deans and presidents.

He was even more thrilled with the reception the cyclotron was receiving on the skeptical and supercilious East Coast.

By 1939, nearly a score of physicists who had been trained on Lawrence’s machines were building cyclotrons at a dozen American universities. Others were ensconced abroad in Cambridge, Liverpool, Manchester, and Paris.

Lewis “told me facetiously that he is going to have the Radiation Laboratory declared a public nuisance,” Lawrence wrote Poillon, not without a certain perverse pride.

Yet John's abstract warnings of the perils of the unshielded cyclotron had less visceral impact on the staff than the fate of the very first mouse he irradiated with neutrons.

The words must have elicited from Poillon a knowing, if wry, smile

Lawrence was looking ahead to the time when the cyclotron’s inconstancy would be merely a quaint memory.

Just as Lawrence had warned Sproul that the cyclotron diaspora was bound to end Berkeley’s monopoly on cheap grad-student labor, it was now ending Berkeley's monopoly on cyclotron technology.

Lawrence told Cockcroft in late 1937 that in nuclear physics the lab had found “nothing particularly exciting at this moment to report”; but in fact McMillan and Alvarez, among other scientists, were convinced there would be no dearth of exciting discoveries to report if only they had time to look.

This suggested that phosphorus would be a better carrier of therapeutic radiation than radio-sodium, since the latter distributes itself all through the body as salt, attenuating its effect.

The aplomb with which Lawrence responded to Bethe’s challenge reflected the Rad Lab’s increasing confidence in the quality of its work.

That comported nicely with a standard Lawrence proposed to the Cavendish-trained Arthur L. Hughes, who headed the Physics Department at Washington University in St. Louis—that “there should be a cyclotron laboratory in every university center” devoted to nuclear physics, biology, and clinical medicine.

In effect, he was saying that there was no virtue in allowing research funding to lie fallow

the cyclotron might be overbuilt for medical research alone, but who could know what wonders that excess power might uncover?

This was the Rockefeller Foundation, which soon would supplant every other source as Ernest Lawrence’s preeminent philanthropic sponsor.

Its cousins around the nation had shaken off the torpor observed by Livingston in midsummer and were all operating again.

He also carried the evidence of his scientific labors everywhere, for his heavy exposure to cyclotron targets, as he recalled, “kept me in a steady state of radioactive contamination, which rendered me persona non grata around assay equipment.”

No one was even sure if carbon-14 was long- or short-lived—its elusiveness might be caused by its having such a short half-life that its radioactivity dissipated before it could be measured; or such a long life that the telltale emissions were too rare to be spotted.

Kamen staggered down the stairway in a daze and made a beeline for Ruben’s lab, located in a derelict old annex to the chemistry building known as the Rat House.

Even worse, his act of solicitude for a good friend resulted in his forever being known as the junior partner in a momentous discovery.

This was a nineteenth-century paradigm of science, the milieu of Charles Darwin, Lord Henry Cavendish (the gentleman scholar in whose honor Cambridge’s physics lab would be endowed and named), and the distinguished Egyptologist Lord Carnarvon.

Yet the lab was no dilettante’s plaything.

The nonplussed Loomis replied, “Well, we don’t know how to make a million volts that can be useful to you. We can only make sparks jump.”

Their friendship “had all the earmarks of a ‘perfect marriage,’”

Ernest’s “ebullient nature plus his scientific insight and his charisma. . . attracted Alfred to him, and Alfred in turn introduced Ernest to a world he had never known before, and found equally fascinating.”

As so often happens in science, their discoveries only whet the appetite for more research, which in turn created a demand for bigger, more expensive accelerators.

Moreover, Weaver counseled, there would be no point in building a smaller cyclotron now, if everything might be won simply by sitting out a prudent delay.

He reminded his impatient supplicant that the full-sized cyclotron of his dreams had important supporters whose backing would yield dividends, if he would simply wait.