PARTICLE ACCELERATORS AND OTHER TECHNOLOGIES

Science

Historians have coined the term "big science" to describe a shift in the way science was done away from the small-scale tabletop experiments pursued by an individual scientists and toward science as collaborations between large cross-disciplinary teams of scientists working with large and expensive technology. The Manhattan Project demonstrated the successful combination of public investment and large-scale coordination of scientific and engineering efforts and marked a prominent opening to an era of enthusiasm for "big science." While many fields shifted toward larger scale scientific research after the success of the Manhattan Project, big science did not originate during the war. In preceding decades, the development of particle accelerators and other big technologies operated in some cases by big groups of people, contributed to advances in atomic and nuclear physics as active fields of research.

Particle accelerators are devices designed to impart energy to particles so as to produce a beam of high-energy radiation for experiments or other scientific or biomedical purposes. Many accelerator designs take advantage of the fact that charged particles can be accelerated by the application of an electrical field with the gain in energy proportional to the strength of the field. Depending upon the particular design, a magnetic field may or may not be used to control the path of the particles while they are being accelerated. Particle accelerators played a critical role in research leading up to, and the production of the raw materials for, the atomic bombs produced during the Manhattan Project. The Manhattan Project benefited especially from the output of Cockroft-Walton, cyclotron, and Van de Graaff generator accelerator designs, which were employed for a range of experiments from the study of particle interactions to the production of highly enriched uranium. The Cockroft-Walton machine and the Van de Graaf generator were developed in the 1920s when they contributed experimental data to new developments in quantum theory and the theory of relativity. Yet the cyclotron, and its creator Ernest O. Lawrence, became perhaps the most prominent example of enthusiasm for big science before the war. Through the 1930s developed ever-larger cyclotrons and herds of scientists at his Berkeley Rad Lab, eventually winning the Nobel Prize for his work in 1939.

Particle accelerators and other big laboratory technology took on central importance to the industrial scale needs of the Manhattan Project when war broke out. Lawrence converted one of his cyclotrons into a giant mass spectrometer designed to help separate uranium. Across numerous Manhattan Project sites, experimental nuclear reactors including CP-1, CP-2, X-10, and the water boilers at Los Alamos proved critical to the science of the project. Production reactors at Hanford, of course, played a central role in the production of plutonium, but experimental reactors contributed in their own right, by allowing scientists to collect data and produce materials necessary for scientific experiments.

Computers, then in their infancy, also were critical to the success of the Manhattan Project. Voluminous calculations were the only way to test central elements of the bomb designs. Initially, Los Alamos brought in punch-card computing machines capable of simple, repetitive calculations. Later, emerging computer technologies such as the Mark I electromechanical calculator under development at Harvard and the even more revolutionary electronic numerical integrator and calculator (ENIAC) being developed at the University of Pennsylvania were utilized.

Design of the bomb made necessary the development of unique and specialized machines and techniques at Los Alamos. Using the small, early amounts of enriched uranium to test theoretical relationships and constants key to the construction of usable atomic weapons, scientists put together an experimental setup became known as the "Dragon machine" in which, for a brief instant, a critical mass would be reached and a chain reaction would begin. But by far the biggest challenge at Los Alamos was developing and perfecting the implosion method for the plutonium bomb. Various methods of implosion diagnostics were critical in determining a host of variables leading to the successful design and development of the bomb.

To continue with a quick overview of the Science of the Manhattan Project, jump ahead to the description of The Atom and Atomic Structure. To learn more about any of these technologies, choose a web page from the menu below:

Sources and notes for this page

The text for this page is original to the Department of Energy's Office of History and Heritage Resources. A useful collection of essays for further study of the rise of big science is Big Science: the Growth of Large Scale Research (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1992), edited by Peter Galison and Bruce Hevly. For consideration of an early period see, Mary Jo Nye, Before Big Science: The Pursuit of Modern Physics and Chemistry 1800-1940 (New York: Twayne Publishers, 1996). The images on this page are all courtesy of Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory.