Big Science: Ernest Lawrence and the Invention That Launched the Military–Industrial Complex, Michael Hiltzik, Simon & Schuster, 2015. $30.00 (528 pp.). ISBN 978-1-4516-7575-7 Buy at Amazon
The intertwined development of what came to be called Big Science and of the military–industrial complex is important for physics practitioners and educators to understand because it helped shape research in their field. And two of the most fascinating characters in the tale—Ernest Lawrence and the particle accelerator—are worth celebrating.
So what does Michael Hiltzik, a Pulitzer Prize–winning journalist, have to say about those important topics in his new book, Big Science: Ernest Lawrence and the Invention That Launched the Military–Industrial Complex? According to him, Big Science was born on the very day in 1929 that Lawrence invented the cyclotron. Scientists’ desire to use and improve the invention, plus Lawrence’s optimism and management skills, led to Big Science’s multidisciplinary research style, with its reliance on engineers and industrial involvement.
The military gets into the mix with the atomic bomb project, which in Hiltzik’s telling was driven at every turn by Lawrence and his invention. To show how the military–industrial complex and Big Science grew in tandem—and how that made some question Big Science as a quest for knowledge—Hiltzik highlights the advent of what is now Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory and the development there of the hydrogen bomb. He ends by wondering whether the 1993 cancellation of the Superconducting Super Collider was “a death knell for Big Science,” and he notes that in the years since, “the dominant patron” of Big Science “is business” and that its future “appears to depend on industry.” To dramatize how Lawrence’s influence still endures, Hiltzik includes a description of the 2012 discovery of the Higgs boson at CERN’s Large Hadron Collider, which the author imagines is partly composed of cyclotrons.
But let’s look at what actually happened. Starting in the 1930s, the increasing size and complexity of particle accelerators did lead to larger-scale efforts, most notably at the Cavendish Laboratory in the UK and at Lawrence’s Radiation Laboratory (now Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory) at the University of California, Berkeley. Also, by all accounts, Lawrence in particular celebrated the grand: He became famous for spearheading the rapid construction of ever-larger accelerators built with industrial and philanthropic support by project teams that included engineers.
Indeed, Lawrence and accelerator technology were important to the atomic bomb project: He provided technical advice to the military, and one of the Berkeley cyclotrons was used to discover fissionable plutonium. But Lawrence was not the most important wartime scientist. And accelerators were not the stars of the Manhattan Project—those would be the first atomic bombs and plutonium-producing reactors. It was World War II and the associated radar and atomic bomb projects—not accelerator-based research—that forged the collaboration of scientists, major industries, and the military and that led to the consequential gigantic increase in the research scale.
However, after the war, no one was more important than Lawrence in shaping the new research system with its military and industrial connections, and no device was more central to that process than the accelerator. Before the war ended, Lawrence leveraged military contacts to obtain federal money to fund his Radiation Laboratory and to build accelerators of unprecedented scale, including ones that would be used to make exciting particle discoveries.
Following the war, a new federally sponsored national laboratory system emerged that boasted the world’s largest accelerators. In the midst of the Cold War, those devices and the intellectual accomplishments they enabled came to symbolize technological prowess, military strength, and the cultural benefits of a free society. By the time of his death in 1958, Lawrence had also set other trends in the national laboratory system. The Radiation Laboratory sponsored both basic and applied research in a wide range of fields. Moreover, his founding of the Livermore laboratory continued the partnership of scientists with the military and added heft to the defense portion of the national laboratory system. The postwar national laboratory amalgam Lawrence had been instrumental in forging thus joined Big Science—so called because it relied on accelerators, teams, and price tags that grew ever larger—with the continued collaboration of scientists and the military–industrial complex.
Lawrence also paved the way for the era of “New Big Science.” With the end of the Cold War and the cancellation of the multibillion-dollar Superconducting Super Collider, the new, more bureaucratic federal patron demanded exacting justifications, and the esoteric agenda of Big Science fell out of favor. At that point, the multidisciplinary, accelerator-centered laboratory system that Lawrence helped shape smoothly shifted to the current system in which large accelerators serve a vast constituency of users who often work in small teams on projects with practical applications. Industrial partners help pick up some costs, but military support is minimal, since defense laboratories now have their own resources.
Hiltzik is a wonderful wordsmith, and he uses some good sources. Thus the book contains many readable and accurate anecdotes about Lawrence. In addition, Hiltzik raises worthy questions about how military and industrial sponsorship have shaped and arguably compromised physics research. He is also right that Lawrence was important to the development of Big Science.
What a shame then that many factual errors and exaggerations undermine the book’s value. Hiltzik incorrectly explains how the interrelationships linking Big Science, the military, and industry developed and played out. Worst of all, he misses what is most impressive about Lawrence’s legacy—that he paved the way for the New Big Science. I wanted to like this book, but I simply cannot recommend it. Lawrence and accelerators deserve true celebration.
Catherine Westfall is an associate professor of history at Michigan State University’s Lyman Briggs College in East Lansing. She is coauthor of Fermilab: Physics, the Frontier, and Megascience (University of Chicago Press, 2008) and Critical Assembly: A Technical History of Los Alamos During the Oppenheimer Years, 1943–1945 (Cambridge University Press, 2004).
