Ernest O. Lawrence

• Born: 8 August 1901
• Birthplace: Canton, South Dakota
• Died: 27 August 1958
• Best Known As: Nobel Prize-winning inventor of the cyclotron

American physicist Ernest Orlando Lawrence was the father of "big science" -- the collaborative, big-scale (and spendy) projects that led to the discovery of so many subatomic particles in the 1950s and '60s. Lawrence went to college in South Dakota and Minnesota before getting his doctorate in physics from Yale in 1925. He taught at Yale until the University of California at Berkeley lured him away in 1928. At Berkeley he invented the cyclotron, a revolutionary particle accelerator built to blast atoms (building on work done by Ernest Rutherford). Bigger and more powerful cyclotrons were developed throughout the 1930s at his newly-established Radiation Laboratory, and in 1939 Lawrence was awarded the Nobel Prize. During World War II he worked at Oak Ridge, Tennessee on the development of the atomic bomb, and in the early 1950s he joined Edward Teller in promoting the hydrogen bomb. (Together they got a new weapons lab established, the Lawrence Livermore Laboratory.) Lawrence was sent by President Dwight Eisenhower to Geneva in 1958 to participate in nuclear test ban negotiations with the Soviet Union, but Lawrence took ill and had to be rushed back to California, where he died. It is generally agreed that most modern advances in nuclear physics could not have happened without Lawrence's cyclotron.

The chemical element lawrencium, discovered in 1961, is named in his honor... Lawrence was awarded the Enrico Fermi Award by the U.S. government in 1957.

For more information on Ernest Orlando Lawrence, visit Britannica.com.

American physicist (1901–1958)

Lawrence was the son of a superintendent of public schools in Canton, South Dakota. He was educated at the universities of South Dakota, Minnesota, Chicago, and Yale (where he obtained his PhD in 1925). He taught at Yale before moving in 1928 to the University of California at Berkeley. He was appointed professor there in 1930 and director of the radiation laboratory in 1936.

Lawrence was awarded the 1939 Nobel Prize for physics for his invention of the cyclotron. In the 1920s, experiments on bombardment of nuclei relied on low-energy linear accelerators. Lawrence, in 1930, began experiments to construct a cyclic accelerator. In this device charged particles move in spiral paths under the influence of a vertical magnetic field. The particles move inside two hollow D-shaped metal pieces arranged with a small gap between them. A high-frequency electric field applied between the ‘dees’ gives a ‘kick’ to the particle each time it crosses the gap. By early 1931 the first model (4 inches (10.2 cm) in diameter) produced energies of 13,000 electronvolts.

Subsequently, Lawrence, and other workers, developed larger machines capable of achieving much higher energies for nuclear research. Lawrence also played an important part in the development of the atomic bomb. He was responsible for developing the radiation laboratory (now named for him) into one of the world's leading centers for high-energy physics. Element 103, lawrencium, is named in his honor.

The American physicist Ernest Orlando Lawrence (1901-1958), by inventing and successively improving the cyclotron, pioneered in the development of particle accelerators.

Ernest O. Lawrence was born on Aug. 8, 1901, in Canton, South Dakota. By age 9 he had become interested in simple electrical devices and by age 13 had constructed wireless equipment. Nevertheless he decided to study medicine after completing his high school education.

Lawrence pursued this goal for a year (1918-1919) at St. Olaf's College in Northfield, Minn., and briefly, beginning the following year, at the University of South Dakota in Vermillion. At the latter institution, he came under the influence of Lewis Akeley, the dean of the College of Electrical Engineering, who acquainted him with the intellectual challenge and rewards of physics. As a result, he abandoned his plans for a medical career, mastered course after course of physics, and completed his bachelor's degree in physics with high honors in 1922. It took him only one academic year to complete his master's degree under W. F. G. Swann. When Swann moved first to the University of Chicago (1923-1924) and then to Yale University, Lawrence accompanied him in both moves. Simultaneously, Lawrence made remarkably rapid progress toward his doctoral degree, which he received at Yale in 1925.

Lawrence's exceptional talents as an experimental physicist earned him a National Research Council fellowship for further study at Yale during 1925-1927. He explored a variety of problems related to his thesis research, which was on the photoelectric effect in potassium vapor. His achievements clearly indicated that Lawrence was one of the most talented experimentalists in the country.

After a year (1927-1928) as assistant professor of physics at Yale, Lawrence accepted a position as associate professor of physics at the University of California at Berkeley. Two years later he became the youngest full professor in Berkeley history. He remained at Berkeley for the rest of his life. In 1932 he married Mary Kimberly Blumer. They had two sons and four daughters.

The Cyclotron

Within a very short time Lawrence established a thriving school of research at Berkeley and became completely engrossed in his work. Very deliberately, he decided to abandon his past line of research and embark on a new one: nuclear physics. Theoretical considerations indicated, however, that to cultivate this field of research one required nuclear probes, for example, charged particles, of large energy.

To accomplish this, Lawrence designed a machine that would accelerate ions in a spiral path between two D-shaped electrodes. This was the "magnetic resonance accelerator" - the cyclotron. By the early 1930s a small model was made to work by M. Stanley Livingston, then a graduate student working under Lawrence's close supervision. By early 1932 a new 10-inch model was producing protons of energy in excess of 1 million electron volts - an event that precipitated a great deal of excitement and celebration in the laboratory. Since doubling the diameter of a cyclotron theoretically quadruples the energy of the particles it accelerates, and since larger particle energies meant deeper insight into the structure of the nucleus, Lawrence repeatedly pushed for the construction of larger and larger machines in the 1930s. He began with a 27-inch machine and eventually constructed a 184-inch machine, which, although funded in 1940, had to await the end of the war and crucial technical breakthroughs for completion. Meanwhile, many cyclotrons of different sizes had been constructed with Lawrence's help and encouragement in many laboratories throughout the world.

For his invention and development of the cyclotron, Lawrence was elected to membership in the National Academy of Sciences, in 1934, and in many other scientific societies; in addition, he received many medals, honorary degrees, and other distinctions, the highest of which was the Nobel Prize of 1939.

War Work

In 1940-1941 a select group of American physicists began laying plans to beat the Germans in the construction of the atomic bomb. Knowing that A. O. C. Nier at Minnesota had used mass-spectroscopic techniques to separate the fissionable isotope of uranium, U²³⁵, from its much more abundant companion, U²³⁸, Lawrence proposed this method of isotope separation as a concrete plan for obtaining a supply of fissionable material. He argued that if the method was made into a large-scale enterprise it could relatively quickly yield a sufficient supply of U²³⁵ for a bomb. In early 1941 he turned his convictions into actions by beginning to convert his 37-inch cyclotron into a huge mass spectrograph.

But at that time three other isotope-separation techniques were also known: a gaseous centrifuge technique, a liquid thermal diffusion technique, and a gaseous diffusion technique. As it turned out, the history of the development of the atomic bomb in the United States involved a race for supremacy among the various isotope-separation techniques. Early in the war Lawrence's electromagnetic separation technique seemed to offer the most promise of success, and as a result it was heavily funded. By early 1945, however, the problems in the gaseous diffusion technique had been solved, and by May this technique began yielding U²³⁵ in quantity. Moreover, at about the same time, an entirely independent project, the production of Pu²³⁹(the fissionable isotope of plutonium) in the Hanford, Wash., atomic piles proved to be extremely successful. The net result was that Lawrence's electromagnetic separation technique, which had made huge demands on him personally, became obsolete in a very short time.

Postwar Activities

Even before the war had ended, Lawrence was planning future accelerator projects for Berkeley. The first that he pushed through to completion was the 184-inch cyclotron. By 1946 it was operative, and soon thereafter experiments with it began yielding results of great importance for particle physics. A few years later Lawrence, after securing funds from the Atomic Energy Commission, began supervising the construction of a huge new accelerator, the electron synchrotron, or "bevatron," based on E. M. McMillan's wartime discovery of "phase stability."

In the midst of these successes, Lawrence experienced a severe setback: the failure in 1950 of the so-called Materials Testing Accelerator (MTA), a machine designed to produce Pu²³⁹ by proton bombardment of U²³⁸. Its failure represented a turning point in Lawrence's life: his health, owing to an intestinal ulcer, began to progressively deteriorate, and his personal relationships with his colleagues took a definite turn for the worse.

Lawrence's life was not without its controversial aspects. Nevertheless, few would deny that he was an extraordinarily gifted human being. One of his associates remarked that his genius lay in being able to precisely estimate what was humanly possible for a man or research group to accomplish. Physics was his life, and for his accomplishments he received, in addition to the Nobel Prize, many other honors, including the Medal of Merit in 1946 and the Fermi Award in 1957. The laboratory at Berkeley, which he directed for so many years, is now called the Lawrence Radiation Laboratory, and when, in 1961, a new transuranic element was discovered there, it was named lawrencium (Lw).

Lawrence was serving as a representative of the United States to the International Conference on Scientific Detection of Nuclear Explosions, which took place in Geneva, Switzerland, when he became critically ill and was rushed back to the United States for surgery. Shortly after the operation, he died in Palo Alto, Calif., on Aug. 27, 1958.

Further Reading

Lawrence discussed his discovery of the cyclotron in his Nobel lecture, reprinted in Nobel Foundation, Nobel Lectures in Physics, vol. 2 (1965). A full-length biography of him is Herbert Childs, An American Genius: The Life of Ernest Orlando Lawrence (1968). For insight into Lawrence the man see Nuel Pharr Davis, Lawrence and Oppenheimer (1968). See also M. Stanley Livingston, ed., The Development of High-energy Accelerators (1966).

(1901-1958), physicist. Lawrence, born in South Dakota, received his doctorate from Yale University, where he was appointed assistant professor. In 1928 he became an associate professor at the University of California in Berkeley. The subsequent rise of its physics department to world eminence was to a considerable extent based on Lawrence's contributions.

The most important among them was his invention of the cyclotron, a circular high-energy accelerator in which particles approach the speed of light as they travel in a spiral path from the center to the rim, where they are deflected toward a target and produce nuclear disintegrations. For a time Berkeley had a near monopoly of the new field of high-energy physics as important results kept pouring in from its new Radiation Laboratory, of which Lawrence was the first director. (It is now the Lawrence Berkeley Laboratory, not to be confused with the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, where basic and weapons research is carried on.) In 1939, Lawrence received the Nobel Prize in physics.

During World War II Lawrence worked on the development of the atomic fission bomb. His laboratory devised a way to obtain fissionable materials by an electromagnetic separation method that was later used at the Y-12 laboratory at Oak Ridge, Tennessee, where the atomic bomb was produced.

After the war, Lawrence became involved in the affair that resulted in the revocation of the security clearance of his former colleague J. Robert Oppenheimer because of alleged security infractions; Lawrence did not side with his old friend. (An underlying cause was Oppenheimer's opposition to the development of the more powerful hydrogen fusion bomb, whose proponents, led by Edward Teller, carried the day.) Meanwhile, partly because of its activities in nuclear research, the Berkeley laboratory continued to flourish under the sponsorship of the U.S. Atomic Energy Commission and its successor, the U.S. Department of Energy. It increased the size and energy of its accelerators and set the pattern for government support of large, near-autonomous laboratories on or close to university campuses. Lawrence also became increasingly active as a high-level government consultant.

Any assessment of Lawrence's significance must take into account his contributions as physicist, research leader and director of large-scale projects, university professor, and government adviser. A recurrent theme is his ingenuity in achieving significant results by simple means. This was true from his graduate work on photoelectricity, through his epochal invention of the cyclotron, and on to his devising of a novel way to display color television images that was a major contender among the methods under consideration in the 1950s. The Berkeley laboratory became the prototype for what has come to be known as "big science," the large-scale agglomeration of projects grouped around a central theme, employing thousands and managed by government contractors (often universities). Because of his opting for Berkeley over Yale and his subsequent status as the first American public university professor to win the Nobel Prize, he drew attention to the rising importance of such institutions vis-à-vis the better established private universities, a trend that has placed vast new resources at the nation's disposal.

At the laboratory, Lawrence is especially remembered for his innovative approach to the solution of technical problems. He was also an inventor of note, as witness his excursion into television technology. Finally, he was a major force in helping to resolve problems of international import. His last assignment, in 1958, was to participate in a conference to study ways of detecting violations of nuclear test agreements, a major obstacle to international pacts.

Bibliography:

Herbert Childs, An American Genius: The Life of Ernest Lawrence (1968); N. P. Davis, Lawrence and Oppenheimer (1968); M. S. Livingston, Particle Physics: The High Energy Frontier (1968).

Author:

Charles Süsskind

See also Nuclear Weapons: Origins and Legacy; Oppenheimer, J. Robert; Science and Technology.

Ernest Lawrence
Ernest O. Lawrence
Born	August 8, 1901(1901-08-08) Canton, South Dakota
Died	August 27, 1958 (aged 57) Palo Alto, California
Residence	United States
Nationality	American
Fields	Physics
Institutions	Yale University University of California
Alma mater	University of South Dakota University of Minnesota Yale University
Doctoral advisor	W.F.G. Swann
Doctoral students	Edwin McMillan Chien-Shiung Wu
Known for	The invention of the cyclotron atom-smasher elementary particle physics The Manhattan Project
Notable awards	Nobel Prize in Physics 1939

Ernest Orlando Lawrence (August 8, 1901 – August 27, 1958) was an American physicist and Nobel Laureate, known for his invention, utilization, and improvement of the cyclotron atom-smasher beginning in 1929, and his later work in uranium-isotope separation for the Manhattan Project. Lawrence had a long career at the University of California, where he became a Professor of Physics. In 1939, Lawrence was awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics for his work in inventing the cyclotron and developing its applications. Chemical element number 103 is named "lawrencium" in Lawrence's honor. He was also the first recipient of the Sylvanus Thayer Award.^[1] His brother John H. Lawrence was known for pioneering in the field of nuclear medicine.

Contents 1 Early life 2 The Developments of the Cyclotron 3 World War II and the Manhattan Project 4 Post-war Career and Legacy 5 References 6 External links

Early life

Born in Canton, South Dakota, Lawrence attended St. Olaf College in Minnesota, but he transferred to the University of South Dakota after his first year. Lawrence completed his bachelor's degree in 1922. He earned his master's degree in physics from the University of Minnesota in 1923. Next, Lawrence spent a year at the University of Chicago, and then he moved on to Yale University, where he completed his Ph.D. degree in physics in 1925, making him somewhat unusual in his field—a very promising young physical scientist who had received his entire education in the United States. These were years when study at one of the great science institutions of Europe was considered to be essential for anyone who truly wished to make a significant scientific progress. Lawrence remained at Yale University as a researcher, working in the photoelectric effect, and he became an assistant professor there in 1927.

In 1928, Lawrence was hired as an Associate Professor of Physics at the University of California, and two years later he became a full Professor, becoming the youngest Professor at the University of California. There, he was called the "Atom Smasher", and the man who "held the key" to atomic energy. "He wanted to do 'big physics,' the kind of work that could only be done on a large scale with a lot of people involved," said Herbert York, the first director of the Lawrence Livermore laboratory, as quoted on that Laboratory's official Web site.

Robert Gordon Sproul was a member of the Bohemian Club, and he sponsored Lawrence's membership in 1932. Through this club, Lawrence met William H. Crocker, Edwin Pauley, and John Francis Neylan. They were influential men who helped him obtain money for his energetic nuclear particle investigations.^[2]

The Developments of the Cyclotron

The invention that brought Lawrence to international fame started out as a sketch on a scrap of paper. While sitting in the library one evening, Lawrence glanced over a journal article and was intrigued by one of the diagrams. The idea was to produce very high-energy particles required for atomic disintegration by means of a succession of very small "pushes." The device as depicted however, was laid out in a straight line using increasingly longer electrodes. Lawrence saw that such an accelerator would soon become too long and unwieldy for his university laboratory. In pondering a way to make the accelerator more compact, Lawrence decided to set a circular accelerating chamber between the poles of an electromagnet. The magnetic field would hold the charged protons in a spiral path as they were accelerated between just two semicircular electrodes connected to an alternating potential. After a hundred turns or so, the protons would impact the target as a beam of high-energy particles. Lawrence excitedly told his colleagues that he had discovered a method for obtaining particles of very high energy without the use of any high voltage.

Other scientists, including Leo Szilard, had both investigated similar concepts, though Lawrence is credited with developing it further and turning it into practice.^[3]

Diagram of cyclotron operation from Lawrence's 1934 patent.

The first model of Lawrence's cyclotron was made out of brass, wire, and sealing wax and was only four inches in diameter—it could literally be held in one hand. It probably cost $25 in all. And it worked: When Lawrence applied 2,000 volts of electricity to his makeshift cyclotron on January 2, 1931, he got 80,000-electron volt protons spinning around (at about 1% the speed of light). Through his increasingly larger machines, Lawrence was able to provide the crucial equipment needed for experiments in high energy physics. Around this device, Lawrence built up his Radiation Laboratory, which would become the world's foremost laboratory for the new field of nuclear physics research in the 1930s. He received a patent for the cyclotron in 1934, which he assigned to the Research Corporation. In 1936 the Radiation Laboratory became an official department of the University of California with Lawrence formally appointed its Director. He served in that capacity until his death.

In November 1939, Lawrence was awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics for his work on the cyclotron and its applications. Not only was he the first at Berkeley to become a Nobel Laureate, he was also the first ever to be so honored while at a state-supported university. The award ceremony was held on February 29, 1940 in Berkeley, California due to the war, in the auditorium of Wheeler Hall on the campus of the university with Lawrence receiving his medal from Carl E. Wallerstedt, Sweden's Consul General in San Francisco.

World War II and the Manhattan Project

Giant calutron plants developed at Lawrence's laboratory were used at Site X during World War II to purify uranium for use in the first atomic bomb.

During World War II, Lawrence eagerly helped to ramp up the American investigation of the possibility of a weapon utilizing nuclear fission. His Rad Lab became one of the major centers for wartime nuclear research, and it was Lawrence who first introduced J. Robert Oppenheimer into what would soon become the Manhattan Project. An early champion of the electromagnetic separation method to enrich uranium and increase its percentage of fissile U-235, Lawrence manufactured his magnetic calutrons — specialized forms of mass spectrometers — for the massive isotope separation plants in Oak Ridge, Tennessee. Lawrence's secretary, Helen Griggs married the future Nobel Prize in Chemistry winner, Glenn T. Seaborg, in 1942, as the three of them made their way to work on the Manhattan Project in Chicago, Illinois.

Post-war Career and Legacy

After the war, Lawrence campaigned extensively for government sponsorship of large scientific programs. Lawrence was a forceful advocate of "Big Science" with its requirements for big machines and big money.

For his service to his country, Lawrence received the Enrico Fermi Award from the U.S. Atomic Energy Commission in 1957, and was the first recipient of the prestigious Sylvanus Thayer Award by the United States Military Academy in 1958.

In July 1958, President Eisenhower requested that Lawrence travel to Geneva, Switzerland, to help negotiate a proposed treaty with the Soviet Union to ban nuclear weapons testing. Despite suffering from a serious flare-up of his chronic colitis, Lawrence decided to go, but he became ill while in Geneva, and was rushed to the hospital at Stanford University. Lawrence died one month later in Palo Alto, California, at the age of 57.

Just 23 days after his death, the Regents of the University of California voted to rename the Lawrence Livermore and Lawrence Berkeley Laboratories after him. The Ernest Orlando Lawrence Award was established in his memory in 1959. Chemical element number 103, discovered at LBNL in 1961, is named "lawrencium" in his honor. In 1968 the Lawrence Hall of Science public science education center was established in honor of Ernest O. Lawrence, who had been throughout his career a passionate advocate of encouraging public interest in science, particularly among schoolchildren. The museum features a permanent exhibit devoted to Lawrence's life.

References

1. ^ Information Office United States Military Academy West Point, New York (March 4, 1958). "Dr Ernest Orlando Lawrence". http://www.aogusma.org/aog/awards/TA/Thayer58.htm. Retrieved 2008-03-07. 
2. ^ Brechin, Gray A. (1999). Imperial San Francisco: Urban Power, Earthly Ruin. Berkeley: University of California Press. p. 312. ISBN 0520215680. 
3. ^ On Szilard and the cyclotron, see Richard Rhodes, The Making of the Atomic Bomb (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1986), 23.

External links

Wikimedia Commons has media related to: Ernest O. Lawrence

• Biography and Bibliographic Resources, from the Office of Scientific and Technical Information, United States Department of Energy
• Alsos Digital Library for Nuclear Issues: Ernest O. Lawrence sources and Links
• American Institute of Physics (AIP)
  • Lawrence and the Cyclotron: AIP History Center Web Exhibit
  • Emilio Segrè Visual Archives (photos.aip.org search: Ernest Lawrence)
• Heilbron, J.L.; Robert W. Seidel (1989). Lawrence and His Laboratory: A History of the Lawrence Berkeley Laboratory. Berkeley: University of California Press. ISBN 0520064267. http://ark.cdlib.org/ark:/13030/ft5s200764/. 
• Lawrence Berkeley Lab:
  • Ernest Orlando Lawrence -- The Man, His Lab, His Legacy
  • Lawrence and His Laboratory: A Historian's View of the Lawrence Years by Heilbron, Seidel, Wheaton.
• Lawrence Livermore Lab: Remembering E. O. Lawrence (biography)
• NobelPrize.org: Ernest O. Lawrence biography
• Nobel-Winners.com: Ernest Lawrence
• photograph of Leó Szilárd and Ernest O. Lawrence

Preceded by none

Sylvanus Thayer Award 1958

Succeeded by John Foster Dulles

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