Ernest Lawrence

 

"Lawrence will always be remembered as the inventor of the cyclotron, but more importantly, he should be remembered as the inventor of the modern way of doing science."
—Luis Alvarez, winner of the1968 Nobel Prize for Physics

A lot of people don't know that there are national labs that helped produce the first atomic bomb right in the Bay Area. The Lawrence Berkeley National Lab located in the East Bay, and the Lawrence Livermore National Lab located between South Bay and East Bay. These labs named after one of the fathers of the atomic bomb, Ernest Lawrence, who discovered and helped develop the physics behind the first atomic bombs. Lawrence was a young Physics professor at the University of California, Berkeley in the 1920s and is best known for inventing the cyclotron, which was a key component in creating the first atomic bomb. The Rockefeller Foundation granted $1.4 million to fund an enlarged version of the cyclotron, a "giant cyclotron" which was located on the hillside above the Berkeley campus. Lawrence's "giant cyclotron" came to a stop when World War II started. At this point in time, the "fathers of the atomic bomb" began to come together and create the bomb that would later be dropped on Hiroshima, the Uranium Bomb. Lawrence recruited young nuclear physicists and chemists to fight the scientific side of this World War and the research these men did resulted in the electromagnetic separation of Uranium. The nuclear bombs dropped during the Trinity test in New Mexico, Hiroshima, and Nagasaki were not invented and created by one man or one group of men. The Manhattan Project was a gathering of intellectuals in physics and chemistry, most of these men were from the University of Chicago and University of California, Berkeley, and more. Therefore, each scientist provided and a limb that would join together with other limbs to form the body of the nuclear bombs. Ernest Lawrence died in 1958, at the age of 57, and he is remembered as a pioneer of science to some, but also, a creator of death. Each man who contributed to the first atomic bombs are in some way responsible for bringing the physics to such a high level, that would eventually give us  the power, and burden, to be the cause of so much death. Were these men of the Manhattan Project, including Ernest Lawrence, doing their jobs as scientific great minds and thinking beyond the boundaries of basic science to protect their homeland? Did they know how devastating the outcome of their creations were going to be on cities like Hiroshima and Nagasaki? Another scientist and "father of the bomb",  J. Robert Oppenheimer, stated a famous quote decades after the bombs were dropped that sums up the answer to these questions: "We knew the world would not be the same. A few people laughed, a few people cried. Most people were silent. I remembered the line from the Hindu scripture, the Bhagavad Gita; Vishnu is trying to persuade the Prince that he should do his duty and, to impress him, takes on his multi-armed form and says, 'Now I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds.' I suppose we all thought that, one way or another."