Big Science Page 22
Loomis’s assistance to Ernest went beyond the social niceties. In 1936 he established a private fund for Ernest to spend on unscheduled and unrecorded needs of the Rad Lab, including travel and equipment. For several years, the size of the fund remained concealed from university officials. Loomis’s donation checks were endorsed to “Ernest O. Lawrence, personal,” with the money to be spent at Lawrence’s sole discretion. “He probably didn’t even have to account to Mr. Loomis,” Raymond Birge reflected.
Despite Lawrence’s reputation for personal integrity, an unaudited private fund controlled by a faculty member eventually made university accountants uneasy. They soon asked Loomis to make his contributions through conventional channels. In November 1940 he donated $30,000 in stock to the university through President Sproul’s office. Loomis instructed Sproul that the university was free to use the funds “in any way that seems fit,” but expressed the strong desire that the money be spent “to further scientific research in connection with the various scientific undertakings in which Professor Ernest O. Lawrence is now engaged . . . I hope, therefore, that you will permit Professor Lawrence to interpret broadly the uses to which these funds are to be put.” Eventually Berkeley’s auditors would bring the fund fully into the formal regime established for all such trust funds, requiring that it be deposited in an interest-bearing bank account and designated as a university asset. Even then, however, they assured Lawrence that the funds could be disbursed “subject to your discretion without the usual University restrictions.” In practice, the fund, which Loomis periodically topped off, remained entirely subject to Ernest’s control until nearly the end of his life, its outflow documented indifferently but, by all evidence, devoted properly to supplementing the work of the Rad Lab.
Strangely, it was not until 1939 that Alfred Loomis first visited Lawrence’s home turf in Berkeley—but then he became nearly a permanent member of the Rad Lab. That initial visit lasted six months, during which Loomis ensconced himself at the elegant Claremont Hotel, located on a verdant hillside not far from campus. Every day he made his way to the Rad Lab in a seven-passenger limousine, which would remain parked next to the wooden building, attended by its chauffeur, while Loomis toiled inside. This was the only sign of plutocracy Loomis displayed at Berkeley; inside the Rad Lab, he spent his days perched on a laboratory stool on the second floor, immersing himself in the minutiae of cyclotron engineering and the physics of the atomic nucleus. He would seek out the younger members of the staff “to learn about us and from us,” recalled Alvarez, who was Loomis’s junior by a quarter century. “I had never before discussed physics seriously with anyone as old as Alfred.” From this experience, Alvarez drew the lifelong lesson that “a scientist can stay active as he grows older only by staying in touch with the youngest generation.”
• • •
Soon after Loomis’s first visit to the Rad Lab, Lawrence enlisted him in a campaign to satisfy his latest obsession: to build the biggest cyclotron ever conceived, its magnet outweighing the Crocker’s by a factor of twenty, and its cost by a factor of ten. In the hallways of the Radiation Laboratory, it was known as the “he-man.” Nor was the resonant swagger of its nickname accidental. Lawrence had brought in the sixty-inch despite the warnings of naysayers such as Bethe. That machine, now turning out radioisotopes and bombarding tumors with neutrons in the Crocker Lab, was the most exquisitely engineered cyclotron in the world, thanks to Brobeck’s painstaking oversight. After its uncertain launch, its stolid reliability had become almost boring; the Crocker Lab seemed more like an industrial factory every day, so why not push past the boundaries of the predictable once again?
Another factor driving Lawrence’s ambition was the speed at which the rest of the cyclotron world was catching up to Berkeley. Thirteen machines of thirty-five inches or more had been commissioned or were already operating in the United States by late 1939. Two sixty-inch giants were on their way, one under construction by Merle Tuve at the Carnegie Institution; another by Mark Oliphant at England’s University of Birmingham. Ernest’s generosity with plans and personnel had fulfilled his goal of making the cyclotron the indispensable centerpiece of any self-respecting university physics department, but the princelings were beginning to make the king uneasy on the throne.
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. Lawrence had the best shot at acquiring the funding to lead the way. “I hope your new apparatus is really big,” Chadwick wrote him in April 1938, when the dream of the he-man was just taking shape. “I feel that one ought to make a serious attempt to get up to 60 or 70 million volts . . . With such particles, we should begin to learn the true mechanics of the nucleus.” This was not a stretch of the imagination; as Chadwick observed, studies of cosmic rays, which provided even higher energies but were hard to control, already hinted at new particles and new forms of energy swirling within the still-mysterious nucleus. “I think the phenomena in the cosmic rays point the way to us,” he wrote.
But Lawrence was thinking about 100 million or even 200 million volts, not Chadwick’s mere 60 million or 70 million. He was not complacent about the challenges, though the obstacles he foresaw were geographical and financial, not technical. Aware that there was no room on campus for a machine with a magnet weighing two thousand tons and that its likely profusion of high-energy particles rendered unsafe any site in a populated area, he set his eyes on Strawberry Canyon, a bucolic ravine east of campus and high in the hills. Initially, he penciled out a construction budget of $500,000; by the end of the year, the budget for construction and ten years of operation looked more like $2 million. That fall, he acknowledged to the Rockefeller Foundation’s Warren Weaver that “in some quarters it might be considered no less than shocking that we should be looking towards a larger cyclotron almost before the 60-inch is in operation,” but no one who knew him could be surprised that he was thinking ahead; the essence of Big Science lay in pushing the limits of research and its tools ever outward. Yet Ernest seemed unwittingly to be nearing his own relativistic limit. War had come to Europe and lurked over the horizon for the United States; the uncertainty of the international situation made talk of an expensive project in basic science seem premature, not to say foolhardy and insensitive.
But two developments that fall of 1939 placed it back in the realm of reality. The first was an offer from the University of Texas to install Lawrence as a vice president at a salary of $14,000 a year, with command over a lavish research budget accommodating the largest cyclotron he could imagine. The second was the Nobel Prize. The first restored the imperative that the University of California take Lawrence’s demands seriously. The second, which recognized the very process by which Big Science grew bigger, made Lawrence even more the darling of every scientific research foundation in the land. His vision still seemed outsized, but it could not be dismissed easily.
The fund-raising campaign for the he-man cyclotron kicked off on January 7, 1940, when Warren Weaver arrived in Berkeley to visit with Lawrence and Sproul. Ernest had spent weeks stoking himself up to a high level of optimism. The proposal was “going ahead splendidly,” he wrote Loomis just after Christmas. “I can hardly wait for the day when these plans will be realized.” He now envisioned a cyclotron with a 4,500-ton magnet and pole faces of 184 inches, a scale that took away the breath of even Rad Lab veterans. “If it looks anything like the artist’s conception,” physicist Robert Cornog told a friend, “it will be the eighth, ninth, tenth, and eleventh wonder of the world.” After Sproul countered the Texas offer by conditionally approving the Rad Lab’s annexation of Strawberry Canyon, Ernest requested preliminary plans from the university’s supervising architect, Arthur Brown Jr. This was a major step, for Brown was among the most distinguished architects in the Bay Area, with San Francisco City Hall, the iconic Coit Tower, and numerous Berkeley campus buildings to his credit.
The new proposal s
taggered Weaver, who had been bracing for a grant application for a machine less than half that size. Only a month earlier, Lawrence had given him preliminary estimates of $750,000 for construction and another $250,000 for operating costs over a ten-year period. The cautious Weaver, adding an expansion factor for Ernest’s ambitions but still thinking too small, had privately recalculated the budget at $1 million for construction and another $500,000 for ten years of operation. That was a goal that could be reached, barely, if the Rockefeller Foundation, the university, and private industry all contributed; at least, he remarked later, it would be “not an entirely forlorn hope.” But as he later informed Sproul, the new plans, which would require $2.65 million for construction and operation, “carried me . . . far beyond any figures which I had ever discussed” with the Rockefeller Foundation’s president, Raymond Fosdick. At the minimum, it meant a grant of $1.5 million from the foundation alone.
Weaver sat through his lunch and dinner meetings with Sproul and Lawrence in a daze, trying not to make promises he could not keep. He was painfully aware that Sproul had recently been named to the foundation’s board, though the appointment had not yet been announced. Weaver advised his hosts carefully that the foundation might be able to contribute $1 million as an absolute limit, but that was only a guess. Sproul mentioned that he was willing to ask the regents to provide $85,000 a year for ten years, but observed that this would be an unprecedented commitment by the university to a single project—equal to the research funds of all the other departments combined. The rest, he made clear, would have to come from the Rockefeller Foundation and private industry.
Lawrence, viewing the meeting through the scrim of his boundless optimism, overlooked these off-key notes, detecting only a resounding validation of his vision. “Dr. Weaver has come and gone, and his visit was a great success all around,” he wrote Loomis. “From the moment of his arrival it was clear that he was very keen for the project; and, as his visit here progressed, he became even more enthusiastic . . . Weaver and Sproul agreed that the project was of such impelling importance that it simply had to be carried out without delay. It was sweet music to my ears to hear them say that they agreed that the project was going to be carried out, and it was only a question to find ways and means.”
Back home in New York and safely out of range of Ernest’s ebullience, Weaver outlined his doubts in letters to both Sproul and Lawrence. He acknowledged, for the record, that “there seems every disposition here [in other words, at the foundation] to agree that this project is, from the scientific point of view, of the greatest possible interest and potential importance.” Then came the dash of cold water: “Were financial and world conditions more favorable, there would be a strong probability that the Rockefeller Foundation would . . . view it as an opportunity which justified support even up to the whole of the capital costs.
“But the joker—and a very serious joker it is, if you will permit the Hibernicism—lies in the phrase ‘were financial and world conditions more favorable.’ ”
A contribution of $1.5 million was out of the question. The foundation, straitened by the long economic slump and beleaguered by scores of desperate applicants, had just refused a request for the same sum from a medical school (unnamed by Weaver) that faced the collapse of its endowment without it. The board would fear a backlash should it grant the same sum for a project “which an unsympathetic and inaccurate critic might describe as a single instrument for one man.” Would it not make more sense, he suggested, to put off the entire project for a few months, even a year? “Professor Lawrence is fortunately still young, there is a great deal of rich experience which can be gained with the 60-inch cyclotron, and there is negligible danger that anyone else will run away with the ball,” Weaver told Sproul. This might just be the right moment to take “a somewhat more leisurely examination of all possibilities.”
Weaver’s words could not have sounded a more discordant note to Lawrence’s ears. His letters arrived in Berkeley on Friday, January 26; at dawn the following Monday, Ernest was on the long-distance line, making an emotional plea for the Rockefeller Foundation to fund the cyclotron without delay. “I may be sort of panicky,” he told Weaver, “but I am afraid of the general international situation.” If things got worse in Europe, philanthropic spending would grind to a halt in the United States; even if the war clouds dispelled, millions of dollars would shift to Europe for economic reconstruction. “That is the reason I am sort of in a hurry . . . It means so much to me—it is almost a matter of life and death.”
He offered to shrink the cyclotron to 150 inches, which would reduce the cost to $750,000. He would strip every conceivable frill out of Brown’s architecture to create “more of a factorylike building.” He would cut his grant request to $500,000 and try to make up the balance from other sources.
To an exasperated Weaver, these ideas were all beside the point. He warned Lawrence that Fosdick was of a mood to ratchet back all foundation spending: the endowment was in such dire condition that less than $1.5 million would be available for all grant making for the coming year—a sum that would be consumed entirely by Lawrence’s vision. 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. Only a few weeks previously, Weaver confided, Fosdick had been buttonholed at a benefit dinner by Dave Hennen Morris, a wealthy former ambassador to Belgium and a board member of the Research Corporation. Morris was a Lawrence fan who labored ceaselessly to solicit donations for the Rad Lab from his circle of distinguished friends. In a typical appeal a few days after the Nobel Prize announcement, he had tried to get Edsel Ford—son of Henry, and the president of Ford Motor Company—to subscribe to a $650,000 construction fund by describing the cyclotron as an “epoch-making” device that would “link the names of those connected with it alongside of Newton and Einstein.” Ford declined to contribute, but during his encounter with Fosdick, Morris alluded to the breadth of support for Lawrence among other influential donors. “You’ve just got to play ball with us on the cyclotron,” he said.
Weaver assured Lawrence that he himself was “perfectly willing to bleed for this thing,” but “we have simply got to take more time.” Lawrence asked, “Is there any point in my coming east at the moment?” Blanching at the thought of the indefatigable Lawrence pestering Fosdick in person, Weaver responded sharply, “I don’t see it.”
But Ernest had one last ace in the hole: Alfred Loomis. Though not a Rockefeller Foundation trustee, Loomis was an intimate of several board members. With the cyclotron grant hanging by a thread, he undertook to hustle them for votes. His principal quarry was Karl Compton, the president of MIT and Arthur Compton’s brother, who just had been named a trustee. (His appointment, like Sproul’s, had not yet been announced.) Aware that Compton’s background as a physicist would give his opinion special weight, Loomis invited him to spend a week at his private retreat on Hilton Head Island, South Carolina. The goal was not necessarily to change Compton’s mind, for he was likely to hold a positive view of Lawrence’s project anyway, but to encourage him to express his opinion in especially forceful terms. Having been swaddled in the moneyed elegance that was Loomis’s stock-in-trade, Compton duly sent Weaver a written recommendation describing the project as “one of the most interesting, the most potentially important, and the most promising projects in the whole present field of natural science . . . I should definitely place it in the number one position by a large margin among the various scientific projects of which I have knowledge at the present time.” He concluded with the declaration that “no one could possibly question the selection of the University of California and Ernest Lawrence as the institution and the scientist to whom the project should be entrusted.”
At Loomis’s urging, Weaver also asked several prominent physicists
for “a considered statement of your opinion and advice” on whether to press for immediate funding for the 184-inch. The return mail brought fulsome endorsements from Niels Bohr, Mark Oliphant, and Frederic Joliot, among other names likely to impress the trustees.
That was enough to persuade Weaver to abandon his strategy of delay. He presented Lawrence’s application at the board’s upcoming meeting on April 3. But now time was short. In mid-February he had asked Lawrence for ammunition against the most likely objections to the new cyclotron. The first question was whether the proposed machine would be powerful enough to produce mesotrons. These particles (known today as mesons) were thought to be the carriers of the strong force, which binds positively charged protons in the nucleus, counteracting the electromagnetic repulsion that would otherwise drive them apart. But thus far they had been detected only in cosmic rays; the possibility of a laboratory demonstration of their existence might well justify construction of the cyclotron that could achieve it. A machine that fell short of the necessary energies, on the other hand, would look like an enormous waste of money. “Is someone going to come along,” Weaver asked, “and say that now a new instrument obviously must be built . . . to produce mesotrons?”
Weaver warned that some might question whether it was necessary to build a new cyclotron at all, since cosmic rays carried energies equivalent to those to be expected from the new cyclotron. “Some of the cosmic ray enthusiasts are very likely to urge that nature has furnished us with particles of extremely high energies,” he observed. Why not spend a decade or so exploiting nature’s gifts before building an expensive machine to generate the same energies? This query bore the unmistakable fingerprints of Arthur Compton, who reigned as the world’s leading expert on cosmic rays. As a Rockefeller Foundation grantee in cosmic ray research, Compton was not shy about reminding Weaver of the potential of such studies to yield the discovery of the mesotron and other fundamental particles; what’s more, he stressed, unlike the beams of multimillion-dollar cyclotrons, cosmic rays were gifts from nature and came free of charge.