Dollars for Atoms

A successful scientific enterprise usually begins as a dream. Then there is a turning point at which it ceases to be a dream, begins to take on the lineaments of reality. The point may be the conquest of a crucial technical obstacle--as when Corning Glass Works succeeded in casting a 20-ton glass disc for Caltech's 200-inch telescope. Or it may be a crucial matter of dollars. Last week University of California's Ernest Orlando Lawrence, newest U. S. Nobel Prizeman, passed such a turning point when it was disclosed that the Rockefeller Foundation would give him $1,150,000 to smash atoms as atoms have never been smashed before.

Physicist Lawrence invented the cyclotron, a type of atom-smasher which accelerates atomic bullets in spiral paths as a baseball pitcher winds up for his throw.

The spirals are controlled by big electromagnets. The bigger the magnets, the wider the spirals, the more forceful the bullets. Dr. Lawrence and his ever-changing army of co-workers did most of their work on artificial radioactivity and transmutation of elements with an 85-ton magnet. Now they have a 225-ton machine for applying the radioactivity of their cracked atoms (and the neutrons which cause it) to biological and medicinal research. This giant hurls tiny bullets with record-breaking energies of more than 30,000,000 electron-volts.

For some time Dr. Lawrence has been dreaming, talking and planning a cyclotron of several thousand tons, which would yield projectile energies of more than 100,000,000 electron-volts. For safety, it would be housed in a vast laboratory buried in a hillside. Last week his plans for a 4,000-ton machine were all ready. The Rockefeller Foundation made its vitalizing gift contingent on the university's raising another $250,000; but it seemed certain the university would do so.

As nobody knows what the 200-inch telescope will reveal in the unseen abysses of space, so does nobody know what the

4,900-ton cyclotron will uncover in the inner heart of matter. But no physicist doubted that it would unlock many a treasure house of secrets; and, more, show the way to new treasure houses now unsuspected.

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