Science: Cyclotron Man

Four years ago a promising young physicist from the University of California, Ernest Orlando Lawrence, left his sunny campus and the ramshackle old building in which he was working, traveled eastward across the U. S. and across the Atlantic to attend a European scientific conference in Brussels. He was the only U. S. scientist invited. He had invented and was already making formidable use of a curious and powerful atomic weapon—a "cyclotron" that imparted great speeds to projectiles for smashing atoms by whirling them around in a strong magnetic field.

In Brussels was...