Early Life
The “atom smasher”, Ernest Orlando Lawrence was born to Norwegian immigrants in Canton South Dakota on August 8, 1901. He attended public schools in South Dakota going on to receive BS from the University of South Dakota and a Masters from the University of Minnesota. Lawrence finished his formal education with a Ph.D in physics from Yale in 1922. After much courting, he moved to Berkeley in 1928 as an associate professor, and was made the then youngest ever, full professor in 1930. In 1936 Founded the Radiation “Rad” Lab at UC Berkeley. Novel in both the research being conducted but also the interdisciplinary collaboration between physicists, biologists, engineers, and chemists. This broke from the traditional silos of academic research of the past, and encouraged regular interdisciplinary collaboration.
Cyclotron
When Lawrence took up particle bombardment, the field had seen little success. There had been work done, Rutherford at Cambridge, but there were too few radioactive materials with a significant lack of the voltage necessary to penetrate the nucleus. Lawrence, familiar with previous work of high voltage particle acceleration, read a concept sketch by Rolf Wideröe detailing the reuse of electric potential. Lawrence realized the design was flawed, but altered the design to include such advanced technologies such as high vacuum electric fields and single plane particle control. In 1931, Lawrence, with the help of a grad student, created the first cyclotron. It used 1,800 volts to accelerate hydrogen ions to 80,000 volts. Lawrence won the Nobel Prize in 1939 for his creation of the cyclotron.
Manhattan Project
Of the many great challenges in building a nuclear weapon is creation of fissile material. One of these methods is to separate uranium-235, an isotope from uranium-238, which is comparatively abundant. The Rad Lab took up the challenge. Lawrence took his largest cyclotron, 37 inches, and magnet, 184 inches, and altered them into mass spectrographs. This would separate 235 and 235 electromagnetically in a process called uranium enrichment. In 1942, the calutron was born. The U.S. Army, under the codename Manhattan Engineer District, built 15 racetracks consisting of 96 calutrons in Oak Ridge, TN. Lawrence was tasked with organizing the staff and combat any technical problems that occurred.
Post War and Legacy
With the first nuclear detonation by the Soviet Union in 1949, the nuclear scientific community was split. Lawrence sided with the proponents for the development and use of fusion based weaponry. This led to his proposal of the creation of a second nuclear weapons lab, Livermore National Lab. Though he supported the design of thermonuclear weapons, Lawrence worked on a test ban treaty with the USSR until his untimely end. Ernest Lawrence died August 27th, 1958 from complications of Ulcerative Colitis. Twenty-three days after his death, The UC Board of Regents named both Berkeley and Livermore Labs after him. Lawrence left a legacy as not only the father of nuclear science , but as the first to explore multidisciplinary scientific organizations and the first promoter of large scale, “Big Science.“
References
American Institute of Physics. (2018). Ernest Lawrence.[online]Available at: https://history.aip.org/exhibits/lawrence/bomb.htm [Accessed 1/2/2018]
Lawrence Berkley Lab. (2018). Ernest Lawrence. [online]Available at: http://www2.lbl.gov/Science-Articles/Archive/lawrence-legacy.html [Accessed 1/3/2018]
Wikipedia.[2018]. Ernest Lawrence.[online]Available at: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ernest_Lawrence [Accessed 1/3/2018]