Science: Cyclotron Man

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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 Britain's gruff, burly Lord Ernest Rutherford, great formulator of the atom's electrical structure, revered director of Cambridge University's Cavendish Laboratory. Also on hand was one of Rutherford's imaginative young workers, John Douglas Cockroft, who was at that time splitting lithium atoms by hurling protons at them. Cockroft energized his protons with high voltages obtained by transformers, rectifiers and condensers.

Cockroft realized the greater potentialities of the Lawrence machine, had tried to persuade Lord Rutherford to acquire one. Rutherford was unimpressed. In Brussels, Cockroft asked Lawrence to give the old physicist a sales talk. Lawrence assented. Lord Rutherford declared it to be one of his principles that the equipment used at Cavendish should be developed there. Young Dr. Lawrence made a quick-witted thrust: "Sir, you use spectrometers in the laboratory every day, but they weren't invented there, were they?"

Two years ago Cambridge announced that it would build an atom-smasher of the Lawrence type. The Cavendish workers now expect their machine to be running in about a month. But Lord Rutherford will never see it start. He died last week, aged 66, after failing to rally from an abdominal operation. His passing evoked expressions of grief and tribute from all over the scientific world. Said 80-year-old Sir J. J. Thomson, famed discoverer of the electron, who once was Rutherford's teacher: ''His work was so great that it cannot be compassed in a few words. His death is one of the greatest losses ever to occur to British science."

Ernest Rutherford was one of the old pioneers in atomic physics and Ernest Orlando Lawrence is one of the new. Last week Lawrence was again traveling eastward, bound for Rochester, N. Y. where the National Academy of Sciences meets this week. Not only as the originator of the cyclotron but as the foremost U. S. destroyer and creator of atoms, the No. 1 U. S. investigator of artificial radioactivity and the headmaster of what is in effect a school for atomic physicists, he was to receive the Comstock Prize ($2,500 and a certificate). With a membership limited to 300, the National Academy is the lordliest body of scholars in the country and the Comstock Prize, its highest honor, is awarded only once every five years. In many quarters it is regarded as the highest U. S. scientific honor.

Atom Anatomy. The largest atom is only .00000001 inch in diameter, and many of the most important atoms handled by physicists are considerably smaller. An ancient Greek, Democritus, coined the word "atom" which means indivisible. For thousands of years this was a perfectly good name but for the past two decades, since the first atoms were sundered, it has been archaic.