Ernest O. Lawrence and the Cyclotron
Photo Courtesy the Lawrence
Berkeley National Laboratory
Patents · Resources
with Additional Information
· Lawrence
Honored
· Cyclotrons
‘Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory
is the namesake and legacy of its founder, Ernest Orlando Lawrence, winner
of the 1939 Nobel Prize
for Physics for his invention of the cyclotron, ... the granddaddy
of today's most powerful accelerators. ... [Lawrence] was the "father
of big science," the
first to advance the idea of doing research with multidisciplinary teams of
scientists and engineers. ...
[The University of California at] Berkeley ... was most anxious to develop
its small physics department. ... Lawrence accepted an associate professor
position at Berkeley in 1928, just a few days following his 27th birthday.
Within three years, he was made the youngest full professor on the Berkeley
faculty [and] invented the cyclotron ... . The cyclotron would be patented
in Lawrence's name, but he never asked for any royalties, and he encouraged
and helped other laboratories throughout the world to build cyclotrons. Lawrence
was also the legal inventor of the
Calutron isotope
separator - but he assigned the patent rights to the U.S. government for a
fee of one dollar.
[In] 1952 ... Lawrence lobbied for and won approval to establish a second
national weapons laboratory at Livermore.'1
‘Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory
celebrated the Lawrence's centennial birthday with a special issue of LLNL's
Newsline newsletter that covered Lawrence's myriad accomplishments as well
as his approach to "big science," recollections from his son Robert,
and articles by former LLNL directors Edward Teller, Herbert York, and John
Foster.
"'Atom
Smasher' Taught Science World to Think Big," Newsline,
August 3, 2001.'2
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Additional information about Ernest Lawrence and his research is available
in full-text and on the Web.
Full-text:
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