Seemingly oblivious to the smoke, water, and stench of burned insulation, Lawrence remained resolutely hunched over the controls, pressing on to higher voltages and more tightly focused beams for as long as the current flowed.16
Ernest’s obsession was legendary at Berkeley. Late at night or even in the early morning hours, Lawrence—sometimes still in formal wear, having just arrived from a dinner party at Sproul’s house—would appear without notice in the control room and demand a report on the current experiment from the cyclotron’s stunned operator. These impromptu nocturnal visits came to be known, not always affectionately, as the “bed check.”17 Canny graduate students learned to leave the lights burning, their coats on a hook behind the door, while they stole away for dinner. Cyclotroneers grew used to the sight of Molly sprawled asleep in the red leather chair, following what Ernest had promised would be only a brief detour to the lab before dinner or a movie. Two-year-old Eric, the couple’s first child, learned to salute his father’s colleagues with a cheery, “How’s the vacuum?”18
On those occasions when illness kept him at home, Lawrence remained in touch by means of a bedside radio tuned off station to the cyclotron’s operating frequency. When the telltale hum ceased, Ernest was instantly on the telephone to inquire whether the machine was down or the boys simply malingering.19
* * *
By the time he and Livingston broke the million-volt barrier, Lawrence was already an internationally recognized figure among physicists. Notoriety, of course, came with a price. In the company of such august figures as Lord Rutherford and James Chadwick, members of Britain’s famed Cavendish Laboratory, and even among young contemporaries like German physicist Werner Heisenberg, Lawrence had the reputation of a headstrong American upstart in a field long dominated by Europeans.20
Among the remarkable discoveries of 1932—the annus mirabilis of particle physics—was a revelation from the Rad Lab.21 Experimenting that spring with deuterons (an isotope of hydrogen consisting of a proton and a neutron), Lawrence noticed that atoms struck by the heavy particles not only disintegrated readily but in the process seemed to release more energy than it took to break them apart. For Ernest, this unexpected outcome opened up a sudden vista of cheap, reliable, and virtually limitless energy from cyclotrons.
That June, Lawrence promoted just such a vision in a radio broadcast from the Chicago World’s Fair, at the Century of Progress Exposition, where the boys had put a scale-model cyclotron on display.22 In October, he was the only American invited to the annual Solvay Congress, a prestigious international meeting of physicists in Brussels.
Lawrence’s so-called disintegration hypothesis was greeted with skepticism just short of ridicule by the doyens of physics gathered in Belgium. Just weeks earlier, Lord Rutherford had indignantly dismissed as infeasible for many generations the kind of practical application of atomic energy that Lawrence already claimed for his cyclotron. In a much-publicized speech before the British Association for the Advancement of Science, Rutherford had asserted that “anyone who looked for a source of power in the transformation of the atoms was talking moonshine.”23
Reluctant to contradict the “lion of the Cavendish,” Ernest conceded the difficulty of penetrating the atomic nucleus—a feat he had once compared to hitting a fly in a cathedral—but nonetheless defended his new-age cannon, claiming that it all came down to a “matter of marksmanship.”24
At Solvay, Rutherford maintained a studied silence while younger representatives of Britain’s scientific establishment quietly savaged the brash American. John Cockcroft noted, ominously, that other laboratories had been unable to reproduce Berkeley’s results. “Inconclusive,” sniffed Chadwick. Heisenberg, author of the uncertainty principle, intimated that Lawrence either had not witnessed what he claimed or had misinterpreted the results. Lawrence made matters worse by innocently suggesting that the Europeans were simply handicapped by antiquated and obsolete equipment.25
Returning to Berkeley, Ernest set the boys to settling the question of whether he or his critics were right. Within weeks it became evident that his startling “discovery” was actually the result of contamination of the target in the 27-inch cyclotron. The vista of limitless energy evaporated, like a mirage, as quickly as it had appeared. In its wake, Lawrence and his laboratory seemed guilty of slapdash science and a premature rush to the publicist.
For someone less self-assured, the error and subsequent rebuff by his peers might have been devastating. Instead, Ernest’s humiliation at Solvay became a valuable object lesson. Notoriously impatient with long-winded mathematics, Lawrence had achieved success to date largely owing to a combination of remarkable intuition and dogged empiricism.26 “Brawn prevailed over brain,” summed up an Italian physicist visiting the Rad Lab.27 For so long as Lawrence and the boys lacked a theoretical foundation in physics, their experiments would continue to be ill conceived and the results likely to be misinterpreted.
After Solvay, Lawrence the experimentalist resolved to work more closely with his opposite number in the world of physics: the theorists.
* * *
One was readily at hand. Robert Oppenheimer had been hired by Birge almost a month before Lawrence but delayed his arrival on campus so that he could finish postdoctoral studies in Europe. Thin and gangly rather than tall, “Oppie” walked with the peculiarly rolling gait of the chronically flat-footed.*28 Three years younger than Lawrence, he had similarly striking blue eyes. (His face was that of an “overgrown choirboy … both subtly wise and terribly innocent,” remembered a friend, who compared Oppenheimer’s visage to that of the apostles in Renaissance paintings.)29
Oppie was another physics phenom much in demand; he had already been successfully courted by Caltech. Oppenheimer ultimately signed contracts with both schools, teaching quantum mechanics at the University of
