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Although the outbreak of war briefly brought work at the Rad Lab to a halt, Lawrence insisted that the march of science continue. On September 2, 1939, the day after the war began, the conflict came suddenly closer to home. Ernest received word that John, returning from a European vacation onboard the Athenia, was listed as missing after that liner was torpedoed and sunk by a German submarine. For several anxious days, Molly and Ernest sat by the radio awaiting news, until a telegram confirmed that John was among the survivors.
Life at the Rad Lab quickly returned to routine. On only one occasion in those early days had Lawrence been heard to express an opinion on the war. (“That man must be stopped,” McMillan heard him mutter while the two listened to one of Hitler’s speeches on the radio.) Oppenheimer told friends that Lawrence’s aversion to politics stemmed from the fact that Ernest’s father had lost his job teaching German during the First World War. Like the rest of the boys, McMillan believed that Ernest did not start taking the war seriously until his brother had almost been killed.8
Lawrence’s focus since the preceding spring had been upon raising money for what he called the “great cyclotron.” During the summer, Ernest had approached the Rockefeller Foundation with a request that $750,000 be devoted to building the machine. That fall, Lawrence appealed to Vannevar Bush—the newly installed president of Washington’s Carnegie Institution—and also promoted the giant cyclotron at the annual meeting of the National Academy of Sciences in Providence, Rhode Island.9
A flinty New Englander who traced his seafaring ancestry to Province-town whalers, Bush was dean of the American scientific establishment and a crucial ally for Lawrence. (Trained as an electrical engineer, Bush had a pragmatic approach to life, which was revealed in his choice of hobbies. He took up archery during the war because it required neither expensive equipment nor rationed gasoline.)10 Ernest was already certain of his standing with Sproul, who had instructed the university’s comptroller to “do your best to keep [Lawrence] happy.”11
On November 9, Lawrence wrote again to Bush, noting that his hopes of getting money from a previous benefactor, dying of cancer, had begun to look dim.12 Later that afternoon, in the midst of a game at the Berkeley Tennis Club, Lawrence learned that Sweden’s Nobel committee had voted him the 1939 prize in physics. The Nobel prize came in recognition of his invention of the cyclotron and the machine’s role in producing radioisotopes. Lawrence was the first professor at a state-funded American university to receive one.
It took Cooksey and the boys a week to organize the celebration at DiBiasi’s, a cheap Italian restaurant in nearby Albany that was a favorite hangout for Berkeley’s cyclotroneers. The centerpiece of the party was a giant cake in the shape of a cyclotron. Since no one was yet certain what the great cyclotron would look like, the 60-inch provided the model. Inscribed on it was a boast that exceeded even Lawrence’s lofty ambitions: “Eight Billion volts or Bust!”13
For Lawrence, the significance of the Nobel prize was evident soon enough. Confident at last that the machine would be built, he was convinced that it could also begin to grow. Just two weeks earlier, he had spoken of a 120-inch cyclotron with a 2,000-ton magnet. Responding to a congratulatory telegram from Niels Bohr in mid-November, Ernest described a machine with a magnet weighing 3,000 tons.14 The new cyclotron was still “growing progressively and has now attained the size of four thousand tons—correction four thousand five hundred—the four thousand was yesterday,” a visiting alumnus of the lab wrote in mid-December.15
By Christmas, the giant cyclotron had swelled to 5,000 tons, with pole faces 184 inches across—the largest diameter of commercially available steel plate. (Until that barrier, Lawrence had reportedly flirted with the idea of submitting plans for a 210-inch machine to Rockefeller. His cyclotron would then outdo the 200-inch-diameter Palomar telescope, also Rockefeller funded.) The cost of the great cyclotron had likewise soared, to $1.5 million.16
At that far shore, the supercyclotron finally came to rest. As the maximum obtainable, it had become the minimum acceptable to Lawrence.17
Yet for all his grandiose designs, and his success in achieving them, Lawrence still had no clear idea of what his mammoth machine might actually achieve. In a memorandum to Rockefeller trustees that December, he raised the possibility that 100 million volts was the threshold at which nuclear chain reactions could be initiated: “Should this prove to be true we will have a discovery of great immediate practical importance. On the one hand, we will have a practical philosopher’s stone transmuting elements on a large scale; and, as a corollary thereto, we will have tapped, on a practical scale, a vast store of nuclear energy.”18 Thus was Lawrence’s vision at Solvay boldly resurrected.
But another, competing view of the future lay buried among the telegrams and well-wishes of the previous month. It came from Johns Hopkins physicist R. W. Wood, whose letter showed that Wood saw further and understood even better than its own inventor the destiny of the new machine: “As you are laying the foundations for the cataclysmic explosion of uranium (if anyone accomplishes the chain reaction),” he wrote Lawrence, “I’m sure old Nobel would approve.”19
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On the morning of March 29, 1940, the cream of the country’s scientific establishment crowded into a cramped corner office on the second floor of Berkeley’s Durant Hall to decide the fate of Lawrence’s great cyclotron. The gathering showed not only the concentration of power in the world of American science but also how small and closely knit that world really was.
Two of the six men present were brothers. Arthur Holly Compton was a Nobel prize–winning physicist at the University of Chicago who had gotten to know Lawrence in 1923, when the latter was a graduate student. Arthur’s younger brother, Karl, also a physicist, was president of
