Science: 6 BEV

The world's biggest cyclotron will be built on the Berkeley campus of the University of California. Last week the U.S. Atomic Energy Commission's Chairman David E. Lilienthal, seconded happily by U. of C.'s Ernest O. Lawrence, announced that the Government will finance a vast machine (no feet in diameter) to dwarf all present atom-smashers. It will weigh more than 10,000 tons, cost $9 million.

The biggest cyclotron will be radically new in design. Its magnet will be a massive hollow ring with a vacuum chamber inside it. Driven by subtly timed electrical pushes, atomic particles will circle faster & faster around the chamber until their speed comes close to the speed of light. Berkeley scientists calculate that when a proton has circled around the chamber something over a million times, it will have six billion electron volts of energy.

This figure (6 BEV) has a thrilling, musical ring to the ears of nuclear physicists. The 184-inch cyclotron at Berkeley generates only about 350 MEV (million electron volts). With this comparatively puny force, it creates mesons, the mysterious particles knocked out of matter by cosmic rays from space. The new cyclotron will give its protons so much energy that they will act like the "primary" cosmic rays themselves, which slam through the earth's atmosphere and plunge deep into the ground. These wild invaders from space have never before been caged in laboratories. No one can guess what awesome things their study may reveal.

The mystery of physics is: what keeps matter from flying apart—and what, indeed, differentiates matter from energy? When science can answer these questions, it may be able to turn any kind of matter, at will, into its energy equivalent. But the new cyclotron, powerful though it be, may not guide man at once to this topmost fruit on Science's Tree of Knowledge.