Lawrence, Ernest O.

Lawrence, Ernest O. (1901–1958), physicist, Nobel laureate.E.O. Lawrence invented the cyclotron and created a new style of physics in his University of California Radiation Laboratory (UCRL), now the Ernest O. Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory and the Ernest O. Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory. Later he helped develop the atomic bomb and promoted the hydrogen bomb.

Born in Canton, South Dakota, he attended the Universities of South Dakota, Minnesota, and Chicago before earning his Ph.D. (1925) at Yale University, where he became an instructor. In 1928, he moved to the University of California, Berkeley, where he planned and developed the cyclotron particle accelerator. Supported by the university, federal funds, and private philanthropy, he created the UCRL, which by the outbreak of World War II had produced three cyclotrons of increasing size and power. In 1939, Lawrence won the Nobel Prize in physics for his invention of the cyclotron. During the war, Lawrence turned the laboratory's capability to the separation of uranium isotopes to provide the critical material for the first atomic bomb.

After World War II, Lawrence built a much larger laboratory, with new accelerators such as Louis Alvarez's proton linear accelerator and Edwin M. McMillan's synchrotron. Between 1949 and 1955, with McMillan and William Brobeck, he oversaw the construction of a six‐billion–electron‐volt accelerator, the Bevatron. This machine permitted the discovery of many subatomic particles in the 1950s and 1960s. At the same time, Lawrence built massive production accelerators for enriching depleted uranium and, later, a second nuclear weapons laboratory at Livermore.

More than any other scientist, Lawrence created modern big physics, with its large laboratories, collaborative, interdisciplinary teams of scientists and engineers, and massive particle accelerators and detectors. His abilities and enthusiasm made him one of the most influential scientists in the United States during the World War II and Cold War Eras. He died shortly after returning from the 1958 Geneva Conference on nuclear arms control.
See also Manhattan Project; Nuclear Arms Control Treaties; Physical Sciences; Science: From 1914 to 1945; Science: Since 1945.

Bibliography

John L. Heilbron and and Robert W. Seidel , Lawrence and His Laboratory, vol. 1 of A History of the Lawrence Berkeley Laboratory, 1989.

Robert W. Seidel