Big Science: Introduction–Chapter 5

By his mid-thirties, he reigned as America's most famous native-born scientist, his celebrity validated in November 1937 by his appearance on the cover of Time over the cover line, “He creates and destroys.”

Not long after that, in 1939, would come the supreme encomium for a living scientist: the Nobel Prize.

At the outset, he shared the university scientist’s traditional antipathy to the patent process, so redolent of commercialism and so distinctly unacademic.

The Higgs boson had been the target of an intensive search by physicists for nearly a half century, or since its existence had been posited in 1964 as the carrier of a field that gives mass to matter in the universe.

The world we live in today, poised uneasily under a thermonuclear sword of Damocles, surely stands as Ernest Lawrence’s bequest, albeit an equivocal one, to modern civilization.

He was a scientific impresario of a type that had seldom been seen in the staid world of academic research, a man adept at prying patronage from millionaires, philanthropic foundations, and government agencies.

This apparatus displayed Rutherford’s hallmark simplicity and style, but the procedure was unspeakably onerous.

These circumspect words produced a scientific earthquake, for what Rutherford described was the first artificial splitting of the atom.

Newspaper editors evinced a voracious appetite for news of the latest breakthroughs.

For a boy just turning seventeen, she maintained, the important thing was to keep him sequestered from “the wickedness of the state university.”

Predictably, Ernest found St. Olaf a stultifying place.

An imposing figure with an aquiline nose and penetrating eyes glaring from beneath heavy, dark eyebrows, Swann was a highly cultured individual, sufficiently accomplished on the cello that it had been a close call whether he would make his professional career in science or music.

Swann’s pedagogical approach was conspicuously nonconformist.

One can see Ernest Lawrence’s career as a recapitulation of Swann’s precepts in action.

For months, he would resist Berkeley’s blandishments to leave Yale, despite the obvious benefits associated with writing his own ticket.

Among them was Donald Cooksey, an urbane Californian whose brother, Charlton, was a member of the Yale physics faculty.

At General Electric’s laboratory in Schenectady, New York, where he and Beams had been invited to spend two successive summers by Albert W. Hull, the company’s top research executive, he showed such a facile grasp of even the most recondite technical problems that he was given a brief as “a sort of roving ambassador” to peer over the shoulders of older researchers and make suggestions where needed.

It had plenty of money and superb facilities, yet it was struggling to build a reputation for scholarship commensurate with its riches.

The department placed its quandary in the hands of two junior professors, Loeb and Raymond T. Birge, who devised a new strategy of snaring scientific prodigies on their way up, before they had a chance to cement themselves into comfortable sinecures elsewhere.

The United States is “not behind except in fame,” he groused to Beams.

Tuve upbraided Lawrence with all the authority of his six weeks’ advantage in age and with all the frank liberty afforded to one childhood friend speaking to another.

Or did he stumble upon it while trying to stave off the boredom of an interminable faculty meeting, as he told Wideroe at their only face-to-face meeting many years later?

It was the first appearance of Lawrence’s method for building the world’s first great Big Science laboratory: the remorseless exploitation of cheap graduate-student labor, a resource he would soon have in surfeit.

The debate over Lawrence’s future at Berkeley climaxed at an acrimonious faculty conclave pitting the hard sciences, represented by Birge and Lewis, against the humanities and social sciences departments.

The committee awarded Livingston his doctorate without cavil.

His invention, it turned out, could also cleanse noxious vapors and particulates from smelter effluent, coal particles from mine air, and much more.

(“I am beginning to realize I have two consuming loves—Molly and research!” he confided effusively to his Yale friend Donald Cooksey before leaving for the East.)

Lawrence’s move into the wood clapboard Rad Lab in 1932 marked an administrative, financial, and intellectual break between the lab and the Berkeley Physics Department, its putative parent.

Raymond Birge, who became department chairman upon Elmer Hall’s passing that same year, was fond of remarking with a wry jocularity, “I don’t know what goes on over there in that Radiation Lab.”

The evening’s speaker might be a graduate student assigned to explicate a recent paper from Europe, or a visiting luminary discussing his own work.

Only a few commercial enterprises showed the fortitude to resist Ernest’s importuning.

Despite the inflow of cash and capital assets, Lawrence kept a parsimonious grip on his kingdom.

The men continued to work heedlessly in a miasma of radioactive emissions, including neutrons, which Lawrence recognized as especially active on human tissue.

The staff's insouciance may have reflected the infrequency of acute injuries.

Although it was not unusual for even talented scientists to become subservient to those of greater talent or stronger personality—as were the assistants, say, to Ernest Rutherford—researchers were still imbued with the self-image of “the lone scientist in pursuit of the truth.”

To those who knew them both during the quarter century in which they joined to create Big Science and dominated American physics, Ernest Lawrence and Robert Oppenheimer were a most enigmatic pair

Ernest projected the air of a worldly bon vivant, but, in truth, the work of his lab always came first; Robert projected the air of an ascetic, but his indulgences were manifold and libertine: wine, women, food, music, and politics.

They socialized together, played together, shared a few of the same habits, though each in his own way: they both smoked, but Oppenheimer ceaselessly and Lawrence sporadically (and, as though in deference to his puritan upbringing, furtively).

“I was pretty much in need of them, feeling ashamed of my report, and distressed rather by Millikan’s hostility and his lack of scruple.”

Robert and his wife, Kitty, were happiest among intellectual bohemians and political leftists; they chose their physicist friends from among those with catholic tastes in music and art, people like the Serbers and Caltech’s Linus Pauling.