4 The Physicists’ War Copyright © 2011. Harvard University Press. All rights reserved. On August 2, 1939, Albert Einstein signed a letter to President Franklin D. Roosevelt in which he stated: Sir: Some recent work by E. Fermi and L. Szilard, which has been communicated to me in manuscript, leads me to expect that the element uranium may be turned into a new and important source of energy in the immediate future. Certain aspects of the situation seem to call for watchfulness and, if necessary, quick action on the part of the Administration. Quick action might be necessary, Einstein continued, because this new phenomenon would also lead to the construction of bombs, and it is conceivable—though much less certain—that extremely powerful bombs of a new type may thus be constructed.1 Eight months earlier, researchers in Berlin had announced to the world the discovery of nuclear fission, the splitting of the uranium nucleus acCassidy, D. C. (2011). A short history of physics in the american century : Short history of physics in the american century. Retrieved from http://ebookcentral.proquest.com Created from apus on 2020-02-16 21:28:23. Copyright © 2011. Harvard University Press. All rights reserved. T h e P h y s ic i s t s ’ Wa r 73 companied by the release of a large amount of energy. (As with the word nucleus, fi ssion derived from cell biology.) By the summer of 1939 it was known in theory that atomic fission might result in a nuclear explosive of unsurpassed power. But this was possible only if a sufficient amount of the very rare form of uranium, the isotope uranium-235 (U-235), could be assembled into a “critical mass,” the minimum mass needed to sustain a nuclear explosion. The splitting of a U-235 nucleus was set off by the absorption of a neutron, which is not repelled by the positive nucleus. It was discovered that when a U-235 nucleus fissions into two smaller nuclei, it releases not only energy but also more neutrons, two to three on average. These neutrons could then go on to split more U-235 nuclei, each of which producing more neutrons. A chain reaction occurs. If the ball of uranium is large enough and dense enough that the reaction continues for many steps, so much energy is released so quickly that an explosion of enormous energy occurs. In 1939 no one yet knew for certain if such a chain reaction would indeed occur. Nor did they know how much U-235 was needed to attain a critical mass, nor the best process for extracting the extremely rare isotope U-235 from natural uranium ore, nor how exactly to set off the explosive chain reaction. But, Einstein informed the president, they did know that Germany was busily acquiring uranium in Europe and that German scientists, who had discovered fission, were hard at work in Berlin on exploiting their discovery. Still, the likelihood that anyone could build a fission bomb in the near future seemed very remote. Less than a month after Einstein sent his letter to the president, Hitler unleashed German panzer divisions onto Poland, igniting the war in Europe. In October 1939 the president, inspired by Einstein’s letter, established a small advisory committee at the National Bureau of Standards to study the prospect of utilizing nuclear fission. Not until the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941, bringing the United States to the war against Japan, Germany, and their allies in what became World War II, did Roosevelt finally authorize a crash program to build the bomb. But by then, thanks to the familiar efforts of able science administrators, a large portion of the physics community was already mobilized and ready to join in support of the war effort in many areas, including the building of the bomb. If World War I had been the chemists’ war, World War II would be the physicists’ war. Cassidy, D. C. (2011). A short history of physics in the american century : Short history of physics in the american century. Retrieved from http://ebookcentral.proquest.com Created from apus on 2020-02-16 21:28:23. 74 T h e P h y s ic i s t s ’ Wa r Copyright © 2011. Harvard University Press. All rights reserved. A dm i n is t r at or s Ta k e C om m a n d Among the able administrators who leapt into action were the familiar players: Karl T. Compton; Robert A. Millikan; Isaiah Bowman, now president of Johns Hopkins University; Frank B. Jewett, now president of the National Academy of Sciences and of Bell Laboratories and vice-president of AT&T; and Karl Compton’s brother Arthur, the Nobel Prize physicist at Chicago. But the lead role fell to one of the most able science administrators of the period, indeed of the century, Vannevar Bush, the president of the Carnegie Institution in Washington, D.C., a research institute and administrative arm of the Carnegie Endowment. James Bryant Conant, an organic chemist and president of Harvard University, served as Bush’s right-hand man.2 Born in 1890 to a middle-class family in Everett, Massachusetts, Vannevar Bush was the grandson of two sea captains. His father was a minister in the Universalist Church. (There is no known relation with the presidential Bush family.) The younger Bush was, writes a biographer, “pragmatic, yet had the imagination and sensitivity of a poet, and was steadily optimistic.”3 Bush was educated in engineering at Tufts College and received an engineering doctorate in 1916 in a joint program with MIT and Harvard. During World War I, he had worked in the antisubmarine research laboratory at New London, Connecticut, sponsored by the National Research Council (NRC). Returning to MIT after the war as an electrical engineering professor, Bush and his students invented a calculation device for solving sixth-order differential equations that is considered a forerunner of the modern computer. Bush rose to dean of engineering and vice president of MIT during the early 1930s under MIT president Karl T. Compton. As an adherent of Hoover’s ideal of the public-spirited corporate technocrat, Bush, like Compton, Jewett, and other leaders, opposed government meddling in scientific and business matters through the New Deal. But this did not hinder his good relations with Roosevelt’s White House. In 1936 he was appointed head of the NRC Division of Engineering and Industrial Research and in 1939 to the chair of the National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics (NACA), the federally funded committee for military aviation research.4 Cassidy, D. C. (2011). A short history of physics in the american century : Short history of physics in the american century. Retrieved from http://ebookcentral.proquest.com Created from apus on 2020-02-16 21:28:23. Copyright © 2011. Harvard University Press. All rights reserved. T h e P h y s ic i s t s ’ Wa r 75 While Bush, Compton, Bowman, and others sought beneficial new relationships for science with the federal government following the demise of the Scientific Advisory Board, Millikan offered the military the full ser vices of the NRC in a collaboration reminiscent of that during World War I. The military refused. It had its own laboratories and the NACA to fund university and corporate research on military-related matters. Having experienced fi rst-hand the benefits of this type of collaboration during World War I, Vannevar Bush, supported by Millikan, took up the cause. He remained undeterred by military reticence as he sought new ways to integrate science and engineering into military research as both a boost to science and a support for the nation. The outbreak of war in Europe in 1939, together with the discovery of nuclear fission, suddenly gave these men the ammunition they needed. In addition, most physicists, incensed by the persecution of scientists and the suppression of free thought by foreign dictators, were willing to prepare for military research, even if it required major compromises with the humanistic, progressive ideals still held by most scientists and the general public.5 Bush, Conant, and colleagues were worried that the United States was once again falling behind its European scientific competitors, especially Germany, in scientific advances and in the development of new technological weapons. The lessons of gas warfare in the last war were still fresh in their minds. Bush had already established the small Advisory Committee on Uranium with the president’s approval after the receipt of Einstein’s letter. Although the United States was still officially neutral, Conant pushed for war preparations in a meeting with Bush, Jewett, and others in Washington, D.C., in May 1940. The nation, Conant argued, was mired in dangerous “isolationism,” and its leaders were unaware of the benefits that science and technology could bring in time of war. Just as his predecessors before America’s entry into World War I, Bush went straight to the president the next day to obtain his support to begin mobilizing American science and technology for the nation’s probable entry into the war. On June 14, 1940, Roosevelt approved the formation of the National Defense Research Council (NDRC), chaired by Bush, tasked with preparing civilian science for military research. As with prior committees, NDRC members included primarily civilian scientists: Harvard president Conant, MIT president Karl Compton, Cassidy, D. C. (2011). A short history of physics in the american century : Short history of physics in the american century. Retrieved from http://ebookcentral.proquest.com Created from apus on 2020-02-16 21:28:23. Copyright © 2011. Harvard University Press. All rights reserved. 76 T h e P h y s ic i s t s ’ Wa r Caltech dean of science Richard Tolman, and the president of Bell Labs and the National Academy of Sciences Frank B. Jewett. To these were added Conway P. Coe, the commissioner of patents, and an army general and a navy rear admiral. A year later, Roosevelt, again at the request of Bush and Conant, absorbed the NDRC into the new and larger Office of Scientific Research and Development (OSRD) directed by Bush for the coordination of the nation’s research in support of military applications. Conant took command of the NDRC within the OSRD organization.6 Although other federal committees emerged to challenge the OSRD, Bush successfully defended his organization as the one bearing prime responsibility for the research and development of new military applications.7 Rather than putting the scientists in uniform, as occurred during the previous war, Bush borrowed from the models of the NACA and the NRC and, again despite the earlier appeals to pure science, readily enlisted civilian university and industrial laboratories to the cause through federal contracts to undertake specific military research projects. Most of the laboratories funded or created through the NDRC or OSRD were located at the same elite universities that had received the bulk of federal research funds and fellowships during the previous decades. In fact, according to one assessment, the OSRD spent 90 percent of its funds for academic contracts at just eight institutions.8 They, and leading corporate laboratories, were now equipped and staffed at the highest levels possible. Among the recipients of the new federal largesse flowing from the mobilization program were MIT’s Radiation Laboratory for the development of radar, Caltech for the development of solid-fuel rockets, Johns Hopkins for the proximity fuse, the University of Chicago’s Metallurgical Laboratory for nuclear reactor design and construction, and Lawrence’s Radiation Laboratory for the study and separation of fissionable isotopes. Purdue University received a smaller contract to use its cyclotron for isotope separation as well as a subcontract in support of radar development. Among the industrial laboratories, Western Electric, a subsidiary of AT&T, received the largest corporate funding, followed by DuPont, RCA, and General Electric. By the time of the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, it is estimated that 1,700 physicists were already working on war-related research. Lawrence’s Rad Lab alone employed 142 physicists, of whom nearly all were engaged in fission-related research.9 Cassidy, D. C. (2011). A short history of physics in the american century : Short history of physics in the american century. Retrieved from http://ebookcentral.proquest.com Created from apus on 2020-02-16 21:28:23. T h e P h y s ic i s t s ’ Wa r 77 Bush and Conant were well on their way to success in their effort to create a new model for the relationship of science, especially physics, with the military and political power centers of American society. It was a relationship that, despite the avoidance of political influence, entailed the integration of research with military needs. Once again, the aversion to political influence did not extend to the military, mainly because most scientists regarded the military as nonpolitical, even though its influence on research might be even greater, while the ideology of humanistic, “disinterested” pure science was not needed, or wanted, in time of war. Looking to the future, the stage was already set for the postwar era. Copyright © 2011. Harvard University Press. All rights reserved. E s ta bl ish i ng t h e C h a i n of Com m a n d Not until shortly before Pearl Harbor did nuclear fission become a top priority for the civilian scientist-administrators. Controlled fission in a reactor was likely to succeed soon, and theoretical research had pointed to the possibility of a bomb, but Conant, Millikan, Lawrence, and other leaders doubted that a bomb would prove technically feasible in this war. That view began to change in October 1941 when the United States received a secret British report on fission prepared primarily by two German refugees working in Great Britain, Otto Frisch and Rudolf Peierls. Code-named the Maud Report, it concluded that indeed “a uranium bomb is practicable and likely to lead to decisive results in the war.” The report recommended “that this work be continued at the highest priority and on the increasing scale necessary to obtain the weapon in the shortest possible time.”10 Bush once again went straight to the top. On October 9, 1941, he presented the British report during a meeting with President Roosevelt and Vice President Henry Wallace. The president immediately approved exploratory research on building the bomb under the auspices of the newly established OSRD. But not until a month after Pearl Harbor did Roosevelt sign a letter drafted by Bush approving work in preparation for building the bomb. And not until March 11, 1942, after Bush had submitted a progress report on the awesome power of the bomb and a possible race with Germany for it, did Roosevelt approve a crash program to build the new weapon. In a handwritten note sent to Bush, the president simply wrote, Cassidy, D. C. (2011). A short history of physics in the american century : Short history of physics in the american century. Retrieved from http://ebookcentral.proquest.com Created from apus on 2020-02-16 21:28:23. Copyright © 2011. Harvard University Press. All rights reserved. 78 T h e P h y s ic i s t s ’ Wa r “The whole thing should be pushed not only in regard to development, but also with due regard to time. This is very much of the essence.”11 Yet not until April 1943 was the Manhattan Project finally under way. Bush and the American administrators were still overcoming their skepticism about the feasibility of a nuclear weapon. After Roosevelt’s approval of bomb exploration, in January 1942 Bush reorganized the OSRD to bring scientists into closer collaboration with the two military branches at that time, the army and the navy. Within days of Pearl Harbor, he had already placed the Advisory Committee on Uranium, now called Section S-1, under the oversight of James B. Conant. Under Bush and Conant, the work of Section S-1 split among three research teams. Arthur Compton and the Chicago Metallurgical Laboratory, the “Met Lab,” took responsibility for the fundamental physics, which included the theoretical research group on uranium fission under the direction of Oppenheimer at Berkeley. Lawrence was assigned research on the electromagnetic separation of fission isotopes using the huge magnets of his new Berkeley cyclotron, while Harold Urey at Columbia investigated gaseous diffusion as a method for extracting the needed rare uranium isotope for an atom bomb.12 Thus, by early 1942 the nation’s entire fission research effort rested squarely under Section S-1, which was under Conant and his vice director, Richard Tolman, of the NDRC, which was under the OSRD, which was headed by Vannevar Bush, who stood directly beneath the President. The military-style chain of command was intentional. After all, the nation was at war. But, while working to bring scientists into partnership with the military, Bush also arranged for them to occupy a dependent and subordinate position within that partnership regarding research policy and responsibility for their work. Only military and political leaders and science administrators, mainly himself, were accorded any voice at all in the overall direction and use of the research. Bush reported in a letter to Conant that during his meeting with the president and vice president on October 9, 1941, Bush had asked the president to issue an order “to hold considerations of policy on this matter within the group consisting of those present this morning, plus Secretary [of War] Stimson, [Army Chief of Staff ] General Marshall, and yourself [Conant].”13 When Arthur Compton raised a policy question soon thereafter, Bush responded in an authoritative tone: “the problem which is placed before your committee is Cassidy, D. C. (2011). A short history of physics in the american century : Short history of physics in the american century. Retrieved from http://ebookcentral.proquest.com Created from apus on 2020-02-16 21:28:23. T h e P h y s ic i s t s ’ Wa r 79 the technical problem and not the problem of what should or should not be the governmental policy in this program.” 14 It was the beginning of another important turning point in the relationship of physics to the political, military, and even corporate power centers of society. Under Bush and Conant, the pure-science ideology of the scientist as the responsible keeper of moral culture and an equal partner with other important groups in society was not only dropped, but replaced with a much more limited and subordinate conception of the scientist. It was a conception reflected in the OSRD’s system of contract research.15 Instead of regarding the scientist as an elite, disinterested researcher of physical processes standing above practical research, Bush and the OSRD now viewed the project scientist as little more than a technician of nature fulfilling a contract, a worker relieved of any responsibility for the direction of the research or its use. Copyright © 2011. Harvard University Press. All rights reserved. The Other R a d Lab The Manhattan Project functioned as a subunit of the civilian-run OSRD and its S-1 committee. Under the directorship of Vannevar Bush, the OSRD pursued the usual policy of funneling federal contracts mainly to the most prestigious university and corporate laboratories. Because much of the military-related research concerned electronics, rocketry, nuclear fission, and related topics regarded as engineering applications of fundamental physics principles, the vast majority of the contracts went for physics research. According to one estimate, in 1942 the OSRD spent four times more on physics than it did on chemistry.16 Aside from atom bomb development, one of the biggest recipients of OSRD funding was the electronics laboratory at MIT. It was deliberately named the Radiation Laboratory, or “Rad Lab,” after its Berkeley counterpart in order to confuse the enemy and outsiders. One of the biggest successes to come out of the Rad Lab was the development of microwave “radar,” an acronym for radio detection and ranging.17 Radar was already a reality before the outbreak of war, but its meterlength radio waves were prone to interference and unable to detect lowflying aircraft. The development of a radar system using 10-centimeterlength microwaves seemed the best alternative for detecting, identifying, Cassidy, D. C. (2011). A short history of physics in the american century : Short history of physics in the american century. Retrieved from http://ebookcentral.proquest.com Created from apus on 2020-02-16 21:28:23. Copyright © 2011. Harvard University Press. All rights reserved. 80 T h e P h y s ic i s t s ’ Wa r and navigating aircraft and ships. By early 1940 the Wall Street tycoon and amateur physicist Alfred Loomis was at work in his private laboratory on microwave radar under contract with the NDRC. Despite the heroic efforts of Loomis, Lawrence, and others, the work was not going very well when, in the fall of 1940, the British exported to the United States a new invention, the “cavity magnetron.” The device, a resonator, promised to produce microwaves in the 10-centimeter range with sufficient power to generate an effective radar beam. The goal suddenly seemed within reach just as the German Luftwaffe began its assault on London in an effort to bomb Britain into submission. Bush’s NDRC, the predecessor of the OSRD, awarded nearly half a million dollars to MIT for a project employing roughly fifty physicists to develop microwave radar. Karl Compton’s connection with MIT and the institute’s long-standing work with government and industry were strong factors in its favor.18 Lawrence recommended Lee DuBridge, chairman of the physics department at Rochester University, to head the new Radiation Laboratory. Because cyclotron builders were familiar with the uses of resonant electromagnetic waves for the acceleration of particles in cyclotrons, ten of the first members of the MIT Rad Lab were cyclotron workers, including several of the top “cyclotroneers” from the Berkeley Rad Lab.19 By spring 1941 the physicists of the MIT Rad Lab had a prototype microwave radar device ready for testing. Unfortunately, it failed to meet army aircraft specifications. But this early prototype was suitable for another use by the navy: the aircraft detection of German submarines when they surfaced for air and battery recharging. Its successors proved more successful in meeting the army’s needs. After the United States entered the war in December 1941, the military demands on the MIT Rad Lab for new electronic hardware increased dramatically, along with its budget. Within a year, the laboratory had a staff of 2,000 and a budget of $1.15 million. By the end of the war, the staff had reached nearly 4,000 members, of whom 500 were physicists, and it occupied 15 acres of floor space in and around Cambridge, Massachusetts, and maintained offices in several countries abroad. Its total wartime funding of $1.5 billion was second only to that of the Manhattan Project, which was about $2.2 billion.20 To keep up with the demand, the MIT Rad Lab established the Research Construction Corporation outside Boston for the production of Cassidy, D. C. (2011). A short history of physics in the american century : Short history of physics in the american century. Retrieved from http://ebookcentral.proquest.com Created from apus on 2020-02-16 21:28:23. T h e P h y s ic i s t s ’ Wa r 81 prototypes. Among the products assembled, many in collaboration with British scientists and engineers, were advanced microwave radar for detection and navigation; radar jamming and evasion devices; and a system for long-range navigation. This new system consisted of a network of crossed beacons in the sky to enable planes and ships to determine their locations to an accuracy of 1 percent. Freed from university obligations, the physicists of the MIT Rad Lab eagerly embraced the excitement of cutting-edge research, stimulating teamwork, and the sense that they were performing a useful task for the defense of their country. It was a formula that few could resist, even after the war had ended. DuBridge later quipped that the atomic bomb ended the war, but radar won it.21 The MIT Rad Lab devices and many of the scientists who invented them were involved in practically every major Allied military operation of the war. During the D-day invasion of Europe in June 1944, an advisory group of physicists successfully jammed German coastal radar and provided radar beacons for the paratroopers’ drop zones. Copyright © 2011. Harvard University Press. All rights reserved. Bu i l di ng t h e Bom b Ernest Lawrence was in the midst of building his monster cyclotron when Bush and the S-1 committee asked him to begin work on the separation of the rare U-235 isotope from natural uranium. Because the extremely rare isotope was chemically identical to the other, more plentiful uranium isotopes, the usual chemical means of separation would not work. Instead, Lawrence used the cyclotron as what is known today as a mass spectrometer, a device often employed for identifying chemicals and forensic evidence. In the retooled device, the electrically charged uranium nuclei moved through the magnetic field of the cyclotron magnets and experienced a force perpendicular to their direction of motion. This resulted in the bending of the paths of the nuclei into a curve. But the amount of curvature differed according to the mass of the nuclei. Because of this, the various isotopes of uranium, including U-235, were directed onto slightly different curved paths according to their slightly different masses, thus allowing experimenters to separate U-235 from the other uranium isotopes.22 Lawrence, the experimentalist, had already worked closely with Oppenheimer, the theorist, on problems of nuclear structure. After nearly Cassidy, D. C. (2011). A short history of physics in the american century : Short history of physics in the american century. Retrieved from http://ebookcentral.proquest.com Created from apus on 2020-02-16 21:28:23. Copyright © 2011. Harvard University Press. All rights reserved. 82 T h e P h y s ic i s t s ’ Wa r a year of collaboration on isotope separation at Berkeley, Lawrence had Oppenheimer invited to a secret conference on fast-neutron fission to be held in October 1941 at the General Electric Research Laboratory in Schenectady, New York.23 Arthur Compton, chair of the conference, was so impressed with Oppenheimer’s command of the theory of bomb design that he appointed him to lead the fast-neutron research unit at Berkeley. In May 1942 Compton promoted Oppenheimer to director of the nation’s entire theoretical research effort on nuclear fission. The task was to combine theoretical calculations with the scant available experimental data on uranium metal and the fission process in order to estimate the required critical mass, the energy yield, and other information required to construct the bomb. Oppenheimer organized a summer research session in the Berkeley physics department to explore the prospects. In addition to several of Oppenheimer’s assistants, a number of the nation’s top theorists participated, the majority of whom, like Hans Bethe and Edward Teller, had immigrated from Europe. By that time, researchers at the nearby Berkeley Rad Lab had already discovered two new “transuranium” elements, elements beyond uranium (element 92) on the periodic table. They were later called neptunium (element 93) and plutonium (element 94) after the planets beyond Uranus. Both of these new elements are unstable, very fissionable, and easily produced as by-products of a working reactor. But only plutonium was stable enough to be used as a substitute for uranium to power an atomic bomb.24 Oppenheimer reported to Arthur Compton at the end of the summer that, in theory at least, a nuclear reactor and a uranium bomb were feasible and that once a reactor is running it could be used to produce the easily obtained fuel for a plutonium bomb. But the realization of either bomb still “would require a major scientific and technical effort.”25 He also reported on his committee’s fi nding of the prospect of an even more powerful weapon: a fusion or hydrogen bomb, called the “Super.” Teller was eager to continue exploring the prospects of the Super, but Oppenheimer recommended, much to Teller’s displeasure, that work on the Super should be put aside until after the war. Bush and Conant eagerly welcomed Oppenheimer’s report as the fi nal scientific justification required, in addition to Roosevelt’s approval, to launch a crash program to build the bomb. On September 17, 1942, the Cassidy, D. C. (2011). A short history of physics in the american century : Short history of physics in the american century. Retrieved from http://ebookcentral.proquest.com Created from apus on 2020-02-16 21:28:23. Copyright © 2011. Harvard University Press. All rights reserved. T h e P h y s ic i s t s ’ Wa r 83 Army Corps of Engineers, which had been assigned responsibility for the bomb project, promoted Colonel Leslie R. Groves, the “can-do” builder of the Pentagon, to the rank of Brigadier General and commander of the Manhattan Engineer District (named for the location of its early office) to build the atomic bomb. The District included the newly formed Manhattan Project, the central laboratory charged with designing and building the bomb from components produced at other locations of the so-called District. The general traveled to Berkeley to consult with Lawrence and Oppenheimer on the task ahead. To everyone’s surprise, at the end of October 1942, Groves appointed the unlikely Oppenheimer as the scientific director of the Manhattan Project. The appointee had little experimental ability, no administrative experience, and a questionable leftist political past. But Groves saw in him a man who could quickly grasp the entire range of a problem, command the respect of other physicists, and display as much dedication as Groves to making this project a success. Even more important, Oppenheimer’s political vulnerability meant that, under Groves’s protection, he was unlikely to challenge Groves’s authority as commander.26 Upon Oppenheimer’s recommendation, Groves selected a remote site near Santa Fe, New Mexico, then occupied by the Los Alamos Boys School, as the location of the Manhattan Project, the central laboratory for the design and assembly of the atomic bombs. The other components of the effort under Groves’s command included Compton’s Met Lab at the University of Chicago, where the world’s first nuclear reactor went critical under Enrico Fermi’s direction in December 1942. They also included the Clinton Laboratories at Oak Ridge, Tennessee, which contained huge industrial facilities for the separation of fissionable U-235 and the production of heavy water (used as an alternative to graphite for reactor construction); and the facility near Hanford, Washington, where the DuPont chemical company, the inventor of nylon for parachutes and stockings, designed, built, and ran plutonium-producing “breeder reactors” over the objections of physicist Eugene P. Wigner, who was working with the Chicago team. (Wigner’s own doubtful design would not have worked because of impurities.) In 1943, at the insistence of the scientists, the University of California, rather than a military agency, was selected to act as the institutional Cassidy, D. C. (2011). A short history of physics in the american century : Short history of physics in the american century. Retrieved from http://ebookcentral.proquest.com Created from apus on 2020-02-16 21:28:23. Copyright © 2011. Harvard University Press. All rights reserved. 84 T h e P h y s ic i s t s ’ Wa r contractor for the work at Los Alamos.27 Lawrence, Oppenheimer, and many of the workers of the Berkeley Rad Lab brought the lessons of big science with them as they transferred to Los Alamos. Despite some objections, the university’s role as the sole joint contract manager of both of the nation’s nuclear weapons development sites—Los Alamos and, later, the Lawrence Livermore Laboratory—has continued almost to the present. It now shares that responsibility. By the end of the war, the Manhattan Engineer District employed over 200,000 people, making it the world’s largest and— at $2.2 billion— most expensive research and development effort until the advent of the Apollo Space Program, which landed a man on the moon during the 1960s. People from everywhere in the country and all walks of life contributed to the effort, from pipe fitters, welders, and Nobel Prize physicists, to the machine operators at Oak Ridge known as the “Tennessee Girls,” and the local Native Americans who served as maids and babysitters for the Los Alamos scientists.28 In June 1943 British engineers began to arrive at Los Alamos to aid in the effort as well. Everyone involved was relatively young: most were in their twenties. Isolated in the New Mexico wilds and with many newlyweds among the workers, there was a veritable baby boom across the laboratory. As at the MIT Rad Lab, all of this contributed to a sense of excitement, a common bond with others sharing the difficulties and hardships of family life in the ramshackle houses, and a dedication to the common goal of winning the war. There was a universal feeling that this was a very special time in their lives. Even today, the veterans of Los Alamos often look back upon those days much as a later generation would look back upon Woodstock. When Los Alamos fi nally got under way in April 1943, Oppenheimer divided the laboratory and its work into four divisions: theoretical physics, experimental research, chemistry and metallurgy, and ordnance. A fifth division was established for Teller with the task of planning for postwar projects, mainly the Super. It was not only Teller’s favorite research topic, but Oppenheimer had apparently also sought to console Teller for having selected Hans Bethe instead to head the theoretical physics division. One of the greatest remaining difficulties involved the triggering of the bombs. The uranium bomb could be set off by joining together two sub- Cassidy, D. C. (2011). A short history of physics in the american century : Short history of physics in the american century. Retrieved from http://ebookcentral.proquest.com Created from apus on 2020-02-16 21:28:23. Copyright © 2011. Harvard University Press. All rights reserved. T h e P h y s ic i s t s ’ Wa r 85 critical pieces of U-235 into a critical mass. But the joining had to occur extremely rapidly, or stray neutrons in the air would initiate the chain reaction even before the critical mass was assembled, causing the bomb to fizzle. The British suggested using a cannon inside the bomb to shoot one hemisphere of uranium toward another at high speed. But this would not do for plutonium, which is so fissionable that it would begin to explode, then fizzle, even at the speed of an artillery shell.29 As fissionable uranium and plutonium began arriving at Los Alamos from Oak Ridge and Hanford, testing revealed that the cannon design would indeed work for uranium. Design and building of the uranium bomb was soon under way. For plutonium, however, a very sophisticated rapidimplosion design was essential. Teller, John von Neumann, and Seth Neddermeyer, apparently borrowing from Tolman, who had gotten the idea from the implosion deaths of stars, hit upon an arrangement involving a critical mass of plutonium shaped into a spherical shell at very low density, surrounded by an outer shell of conventional high explosive. Upon ignition, the high explosive would implode the plutonium extremely rapidly into a tiny ball of dense critical mass, setting off a nuclear explosion. But the implosive compression of plutonium had to occur under a precisely spherical shock wave, or else the resulting lopsided critical mass would yield only a minor eruption. If a spherical design could be made to work, plutonium would be more suitable than uranium for the production of an arsenal of nuclear weapons, owing to the relatively easy acquisition of plutonium from the breeder reactors now pumping out the highly fissile material at the Hanford site.30 With the implosion design and the arrival of the British engineers, the pace quickened at Los Alamos. Ever determined to achieve success, General Groves was eager to deploy the new weapon as soon as possible. As early as March 1944, three months before the D-day invasion of Germanoccupied France, he mobilized the Army Air Force to begin preparations for dropping the atomic bombs on Germany and Japan. In September, Groves ordered production schedules for the delivery of uranium and plutonium; in January 1945 Colonel Paul W. Tibbets, selected to pilot Enola Gay, the B-29 bomber that would drop the uranium bomb on Hiroshima, was already preparing his flight crew for its fateful task. Cassidy, D. C. (2011). A short history of physics in the american century : Short history of physics in the american century. Retrieved from http://ebookcentral.proquest.com Created from apus on 2020-02-16 21:28:23. 86 T h e P h y s ic i s t s ’ Wa r Copyright © 2011. Harvard University Press. All rights reserved. Droppi ng t h e Bom bs Because the solution to the implosion problem still seemed doubtful, the Los Alamos scientists petitioned the navy captain in charge of the ordnance division for a precombat test of the plutonium bomb. None was needed for the uranium bomb, which they were certain would succeed. The captain hit the roof. He complained to Groves that by requesting a test the scientists displayed an interest only in doing scientific research, and that this test would delay the dropping of the bomb. Oppenheimer attempted unsuccessfully to defend the scientists. Only after a visit to the laboratory by James Conant and a letter from him approving the test did the scientists at the bottom of the command chain receive their wish.31 The successful test of the plutonium bomb, the first nuclear detonation in history, occurred on July 16, 1945, at the so-called Trinity test site in the New Mexico desert near Alamagordo, about 250 miles south of Los Alamos. The next day, a similar plutonium bomb was on its way to the Pacific to join the uranium bomb for use on Japan. As plans hastened for the Trinity test, the momentum of the work and the pressure to complete it as soon as possible built to such an extent that any doubts at Los Alamos about the project’s ultimate goals were overcome by the sheer excitement of the science and the rapid progress of the work.32 Still, the possibility remained that Nazi Germany would be the first to achieve a nuclear weapon, with consequences too horrible to imagine. But by the end of 1944, as American and British forces began smashing their way into France and Germany after D-day, it was evident that the Germans did not have the bomb and that Germany would be defeated before the Allied bomb was ready. Joseph Rotblat, a Polish refugee engineer on the British team, quietly resigned from the project. There was no longer any need for the bomb, he felt: “The whole purpose of my being at Los Alamos ceased to be, and I asked for permission to leave and return to Britain.”33 Permission was granted. Although others had avoided joining the Manhattan Project, and some now questioned the purpose of the project, Rotblat was the only one to resign. He later received the Nobel Peace Prize for his postwar work toward nuclear control and disarmament. As the building of the bombs proceeded at Los Alamos, General Groves appointed a joint military and civilian Targeting Committee chaired by Cassidy, D. C. (2011). A short history of physics in the american century : Short history of physics in the american century. Retrieved from http://ebookcentral.proquest.com Created from apus on 2020-02-16 21:28:23. Copyright © 2011. Harvard University Press. All rights reserved. T h e P h y s ic i s t s ’ Wa r 87 Oppenheimer. Its task was to select the Japa nese cities to be targeted and to determine the procedure for dropping the bombs, including the optimum height of detonation in order to achieve the maximum possible devastation. Physicists were then dispatched to the Pacific to arm the bombs for detonation in flight over Hiroshima and Nagasaki. In the dropping of the bombs, physicists were not just the providers of new technical weapons but willing partners in their use. Matters took a different turn at the Chicago Met Lab after it had completed its assigned tasks. Following the German surrender in early May 1945, objections to use of the bomb on Japan grew louder. They found expression in two important documents that emerged from Chicago. One was a petition circulated by Hungarian refugee Leo Szilard and submitted to the newly installed President Harry S. Truman on July 17, 1945, the day after Trinity. (Roosevelt had died in office on April 12, 1945.) The petition called upon the president to consider “the moral responsibilities which are involved” and to offer the Japanese an opportunity to surrender rather than being subjected to attack without warning. Otherwise, the petition continued, a surprise attack would set a dangerous precedent for future nuclear warfare. The president, however, had already left Washington for a meeting of Allied leaders in Potsdam, Germany.34 The second document, the so-called Franck Report, emerged from the Chicago laboratory’s Committee on Political and Social Problems, established at the Met Lab by its director, Arthur Compton. The chair of the committee, Nobel physicist James Franck, a refugee from Nazi Germany, submitted the report to the secretary of war on June 11, 1945.35 Like the Szilard Petition, the Franck Report opposed a surprise nuclear attack on Japan. It also called for a public demonstration to the Japanese of the power of the bomb; and it warned of a postwar nuclear arms race if the United States used the bomb. But, equally important, the Franck Report may be seen as an attempt by the scientists to regain control of their work. “In the past,” they declared, “scientists could disclaim direct responsibility for the use to which mankind had put their disinterested discoveries.” But this is no longer possible with nuclear weapons, they wrote, “which are fraught with infinitely greater dangers” than past inventions. Of course, the report declared, “the scientists on this Project do not presume to speak authoritatively on problems Cassidy, D. C. (2011). A short history of physics in the american century : Short history of physics in the american century. Retrieved from http://ebookcentral.proquest.com Created from apus on 2020-02-16 21:28:23. Copyright © 2011. Harvard University Press. All rights reserved. 88 T h e P h y s ic i s t s ’ Wa r of national and international policy.” But, they continued, scientists are among the small number of people who do have knowledge of the technical aspects of these weapons and of the “grave danger for the safety of this country as well as for the future of all the other nations, of which the rest of mankind is unaware. We therefore feel it our duty to urge that the political problems, arising from the mastering of nuclear power, be recognized . . . and that appropriate steps be taken for their study and the preparation of necessary decisions.”36 In the way of bureaucracies, the secretary of war passed the Franck Report to his Interim Committee on nuclear issues, headed by Bush and Conant, who passed it to their committee’s Scientific Advisory Panel, consisting of Oppenheimer as chair, Ernest Lawrence, Enrico Fermi, and Arthur Compton. The advisory panel found no feasible alternative to a surprise nuclear attack on Japan. A demonstration bomb might prove to be a dud, they reasoned, thus causing the opposite effect. If warned of an impending attack, the Japanese might put prisoners of war in the target area. Instead, the committee supported an argument put forth by Compton and others at the time who emphasized “the opportunity of saving American lives by immediate military use.”37 It is estimated that a D-day style Allied invasion of the Japanese homeland would have cost upward of a million lives, including Japanese as well American and those of the other Allies.38 Regarding policy matters, the advisory panel went even farther. In an important statement for the postwar era, Oppenheimer, writing for the panel, renounced the Franck Report’s insistence on a measure of responsibility by the scientists for the use of their work. He reaffirmed Bush’s vision of scientists as contractors providing technical results with no role in decision making concerning their use. “With regard to these general aspects of the use of atomic energy, it is clear that we, as scientific men, have no proprietary rights. It is true that we are among the few citizens who have had occasion to give thoughtful consideration to these problems during the past few years. We have, however, no claim to special competence in solving the political, social, and military problems which are presented by the advent of atomic power.”39 On July 26, ten days after the successful Trinity test, the leaders of the United States, Great Britain, and China issued an ultimatum to the Japanese demanding unconditional surrender. “The alternative for Japan is Cassidy, D. C. (2011). A short history of physics in the american century : Short history of physics in the american century. Retrieved from http://ebookcentral.proquest.com Created from apus on 2020-02-16 21:28:23. T h e P h y s ic i s t s ’ Wa r 89 Copyright © 2011. Harvard University Press. All rights reserved. prompt and utter destruction,” the ultimatum declared—without elaboration.40 The Japanese rejected it. On August 6, 1945, the uranium bomb obliterated 68 percent of the Japanese port city of Hiroshima, along with many of its residents. Three days later, the plutonium bomb devastated Nagasaki with another great loss of life. It is estimated that in the range of 200,000 people died in the two blasts and another 100,000 died later of injuries, burns, and radiation poisoning. The Japanese government received another shock on August 9 when the Soviet Union declared war on Japan and invaded Manchuria, then occupied by Japanese forces. On August 15, Japan sued for peace. On September 2, Japanese representatives surrendered unconditionally. The physicists’ war was over. Cassidy, D. C. (2011). A short history of physics in the american century : Short history of physics in the american century. Retrieved from http://ebookcentral.proquest.com Created from apus on 2020-02-16 21:28:23. Copyright © 2011. Harvard University Press. All rights reserved. 5 Taming the Endless Frontier The stunning successes of the Manhattan Project, the MIT Radiation Laboratory, and the many other research and development efforts during the war convinced the nation’s leaders of the crucial importance of fundamental discoveries achieved through what was now called basic research. The close collaboration of the military with scientists and engineers working in the highly technical disciplines of nuclear physics, electromagnetic theory, and electronics had produced the war’s “winning weapons.” As victory approached, President Roosevelt asked his top science administrator Vannevar Bush to reconnoiter the contours of the postwar relationship between science and the federal government. In his well-known and widely influential report submitted to President Truman in 1945 titled Science: The Endless Frontier, Bush, still director of the Office of Scientific Research and Development (OSRD), argued not only that the close partnership must continue, but that a devastated Eu rope could no longer provide the new fundamental knowledge on which the successful wartime technologies had largely rested. The federal government must now take Cassidy, D. C. (2011). A short history of physics in the american century : Short history of physics in the american century. Retrieved from http://ebookcentral.proquest.com Created from apus on 2020-02-16 21:28:49. Copyright © 2011. Harvard University Press. All rights reserved. Taming the Endless Frontier 91 an active role in funding and promoting basic research in civilian laboratories, and those laboratories must be willing to accept federal funding. In the pure science tradition he defi ned the basic research to be promoted as that performed “without thought of practical ends.” Despite its federal funding, the sponsored research would entail the curiosity-driven exploration for new knowledge of nature on the endless frontier of science.1 This knowledge would eventually fi nd its way into new beneficial applications. By not exploring that endless frontier, he argued, the nation would place itself at a competitive disadvantage, militarily and economically. Federal officials already expected that new discoveries in basic physics would continue to yield benefits for “national security”—not only by enabling the development of new weaponry but also by enhancing the nation’s scientific prestige in the increasing competition for power and recognition with the Soviet Union. Industry, too, expected potential postwar contributions of unfettered pure physics to the development of new products for the booming consumer society. But government still needed encouragement toward active promotion. Before the war, business and philanthropy had funded basic research in the big-science accelerator laboratories in the expectation of new patents and medical cures. The federal government, Bush argued, must now take on this role. Even as physicists remained suspicious of government political influence, they understood the necessity of federal funding for large-scale projects whose costs soon exceeded the means of universities and private donors and even most corporations. Physicists needed the government as much as the government needed physicists. But the partnership had to be redefined as the nation entered the postwar era. T h e N at ion a l Sc i e nc e Fou n dat ion One avenue to the redefined partnership ran through Bush’s report to the president. The Bush report is best known for its main proposal, the establishment of a new federal agency to replace the OSRD and to institutionalize Bush’s vision of the postwar science-government partnership. It led to what became today’s National Science Foundation (NSF). Drawing upon elements of prewar pure science and his own wartime success, Bush presented four main arguments for the new foundation: the essential need for basic research as the foundation of future power and prosperity; the Cassidy, D. C. (2011). A short history of physics in the american century : Short history of physics in the american century. Retrieved from http://ebookcentral.proquest.com Created from apus on 2020-02-16 21:28:49. 92 Taming the Endless Frontier Copyright © 2011. Harvard University Press. All rights reserved. vital role that government funding must play in fostering civilian research; the need for a civilian-directed national science policy, including a military research policy; and, finally, the freedom of inquiry for basic research and researchers from government policy meddling, even as universities accepted huge sums in support of the federal policy agenda. In order to achieve these aims, Bush proposed a civilian “National Research Foundation.” As did the wartime OSRD, the new foundation would act as an intermediary. It would funnel federal research funds directly to universities and other nonprofit laboratories “that,” he wrote, “should by contract and otherwise support long-range research on military matters.”2 If Bush had his way, physicists and other basic researchers would be freed as before from political influence and obligations regarding their work, but, also as during the war, they would be subject instead to the demands and obligations of long-range research on “military matters.” In return they would achieve secure federal funding; civilian administrators would exercise influence equal to federal authorities over the supported research; and, in the long run, the nation would reap the competitive benefits. As early as 1945, Senator Harley M. Kilgore, a New Deal Democrat, submitted a bill for the creation of what was now called the National Science Foundation to replace the OSRD—but not exactly along the lines Bush had in mind. The new NSF would fund research and education in all fields of science and medicine, including civilian military research, but it would also include the social sciences. Under the authority of an administrator appointed by the president, Kilgore’s NSF would also establish and coordinate a national research policy, but it would direct grants as well to applied research for the social good. It would also vest all patent rights from funded research in the federal government rather than in private hands, and it would spread its funds evenly across the country and across research institutions in order to raise the quality of all. The Kilgore approach was straight out of the New Deal. In opposition to it, Senator Warren Magnuson, also inspired by Bush, submitted an alternative to the Kilgore bill in 1945. The Magnuson bill replaced the president’s appointee as the overseer of the foundation by an autonomous Science Board of civilian scientists in order to insulate the foundation from political influence. (But Congress would still hold the purse strings.) In addition to the contract system, the NSF would operate through the Cassidy, D. C. (2011). A short history of physics in the american century : Short history of physics in the american century. Retrieved from http://ebookcentral.proquest.com Created from apus on 2020-02-16 21:28:49. Copyright © 2011. Harvard University Press. All rights reserved. Taming the Endless Frontier 93 project-grant system invented by German scientists during the 1920s, and for much the same reason: to insulate science from the German democracy of the period. In this system, researchers submitted project proposals for competitive evaluation through independent peer review and approval by the independent Science Board. It was a process that would prove as highly successful for the Americans as it had for the Germans. In addition, the Magnuson bill, with the concurrence of the Science Board, stripped from Bush’s plan the funding of military-related civilian research. It also excluded funding for the social sciences, which Bush regarded as politically motivated. Despite President Truman’s concerns about Bush’s own political motives, a compromise NSF bill embodying much of Bush’s vision, except for civilian military research, finally passed Congress, and Truman signed it into law in 1950.3 In its operation, the NSF exhibited the familiar strategy of pushing the existing peaks higher—the channeling of funds to large numbers of selected individuals at a small number of top universities, located mainly on the east and west coasts. Because those scientists were already among the elite, they naturally submitted the most competitive proposals for funding. In 1954–1955, for instance, 62 percent of NSF grants went to doctoral and postdoctoral researchers at just eleven institutions, all housing large research groups led by a few big-name scientists. This emphasis on supporting an elite meritocracy of researchers extended throughout the federal funding scheme for science in the United States, including physics. But because the NSF did not handle military research, Defense Department agencies quickly emerged as by far the nation’s largest source of federal funds for research and development thereafter. According to NSF statistics, in fiscal year 1951, the Defense Department provided nearly 70 percent of federal research and development (R&D) funds, about $1.3 billion, while the entire budget for the NSF amounted to only about $150,000 (see Table 2 in the Appendix). During the academic year 1952–1953, there were ninety physics PhD granting institutions in the United States, but 72 percent of all federal funds for nonclassified academic research in physics went to just seventeen institutions enrolling 65 percent of the nation’s physics graduate students.4 Still, as in the 1920s and 1930s, pushing the peaks higher once again achieved its purpose. It brought huge success to American physics in Cassidy, D. C. (2011). A short history of physics in the american century : Short history of physics in the american century. Retrieved from http://ebookcentral.proquest.com Created from apus on 2020-02-16 21:28:49. 94 Taming the Endless Frontier discoveries and growth during the 1950s and 1960s, and it maintained the nation at the forefront of world research in what many now regarded as the “American century,” even if only a fraction of American physicists, and even fewer female physicists, could participate in the new discoveries. Copyright © 2011. Harvard University Press. All rights reserved. T h e M i l i ta ry Ta k e s C om m a n d Having learned the lesson of the atom bomb, whose origins lay in seemingly arcane nuclear research, most military leaders required no convincing about the potential military value of “pure” science, even if they could not immediately foresee any useful applications. Funds began to flow into basic research almost as soon as the war ended. General Groves was the first to leap into action. In the fall of 1945 he provided $175,000 in leftover Manhattan Project funds for a new “synchrotron” accelerator at Berkeley. Lawrence’s big 184-inch machine was capable of reaching the worldrecord energy of 100 million electron volts (MeV), but it hit a wall erected by relativity theory. As accelerated particles increase in speed, or kinetic energy, they also increase in mass, as required by Einstein’s theory of special relativity. Because of the increasing masses of the accelerated particles, it is difficult to keep them on the cyclotron’s circular track. Drawing upon an idea put forth by Australian physicist Marcus Oliphant, Lawrence’s right-hand man Edwin McMillan solved the problem by altering the strength of the magnetic field and the frequency of the accelerating electric field in synchronization with each other and with the increasing masses of the particles. Thanks to Groves’s generosity, by 1946 Berkeley’s new “synchrotron” was up and running and producing particle energies exceeding 200 MeV. This was more than enough energy needed to produce new particles— and new discoveries— out of the energies of accelerated particles smashing into targets.5 The Groves grant served as both a reward for wartime ser vice and a down payment on any future discoveries of potential military value. Not to let the army gain an advantage, in 1946 the navy opened the Office of Naval Research (ONR) in Arlington, Virginia. It began doling out millions in contract funds for basic and applied research to nearly every serious researcher who asked, and with few strings attached.6 The idea that independent “pure research” would inevitably lead to practical applica- Cassidy, D. C. (2011). A short history of physics in the american century : Short history of physics in the american century. Retrieved from http://ebookcentral.proquest.com Created from apus on 2020-02-16 21:28:49. Copyright © 2011. Harvard University Press. All rights reserved. Taming the Endless Frontier 95 tions required little argumentation. For the navy there was no question that curiosity-driven research was as potentially beneficial to the military as was applied research and development. The ONR became the primary supporter of the nation’s academic research laboratories, and American scientists became the best funded of any in the postwar industrialized world. The ONR support to physicists in their home laboratories became so ubiquitous that nearly 80 percent of the papers presented during a meeting of the American Physical Society in 1948 acknowledged ONR support.7 So much money flowed into research from military and nuclearfunding agencies that some physicists began to worry about the public perception of physics. Lee DuBridge, Millikan’s successor as president of Caltech, told a congressional committee, “There is a wide-spread feeling in the country that the only purpose of science is to develop weapons of war and that science can be kept on a wartime footing . . . The chief goal of science is not to develop weapons, but to understand nature.”8 Massive military funding helped drive the rapid expansion of American science, promoted the growth of computer technology, fostered new hybrid disciplines such as geophysics, and supported important foundational studies in fields such as physical meteorology and global warming. But few scientists apparently bothered to consider the potential effects of military funding, even without visible strings attached.9 Nevertheless, such funding did come at a price for the scientists and their science. By accepting federal defense funds, the scientific community could not easily object to military plans that it might find objectionable, including the later program to build the hydrogen bomb. Nor could the defense-supported scientific community easily object to the heavy-handed treatment of its members by McCarthy era inquisitions, imposed loyalty oaths, and the laboratory secrecy required by the national-security state. Most importantly, however, historian Paul Forman has argued that the generous military funding of science caused “a qualitative change in its purposes and character.” Impressed by the war time successes of radar, rockets, and the atomic bomb, military funders tended to emphasize technological superiority over fundamental new scientific insights. The effects, Forman argued, could be observed, for example, in the study of quantum electronics, which brought us the laser: “we may say that support by military agencies and consultation on military problems had effectively rotated the Cassidy, D. C. (2011). A short history of physics in the american century : Short history of physics in the american century. Retrieved from http://ebookcentral.proquest.com Created from apus on 2020-02-16 21:28:49. 96 Taming the Endless Frontier Copyright © 2011. Harvard University Press. All rights reserved. orientation of academic physics toward techniques and applications . . . Physicists had lost control of their discipline.”10 Other historians, most notably Daniel Kevles, have disputed the “distortionist” argument that military funding “seduced American physicists from, so to speak, a ‘true basic physics.’ ” Instead, Kevles argues, such funding exerted a positive influence, not only by promoting the rapid expansion of physics, but also by helping to integrate American physics into the national-security system as both a research and an advisory enterprise, where it enjoyed greater influence in promoting its interests.11 Others have perceived the possibility of a middle position arising out of a “ ‘grey area’ in the distortionist debate”: scientists were able to maintain a measure of independence even as their institutions engaged in classified research or were heavily funded by the military.12 As tensions with the Soviet Union increased after the war, the nation continued its weapons programs while maintaining science and engineering on a permanent war footing. Appropriate institutions to manage these activities now became essential. While the ONR provided one channel of military funding and the NSF another for nonmilitary funding to universities, a new organization was needed to replace the Manhattan District and to oversee all the nation’s nuclear research. In October 1945, the Truman administration submitted to Congress the May-Johnson Bill for the establishment of an Atomic Energy Commission (AEC). Named for the two senators who sponsored the bill, it was largely the product of army administrators, including General Groves. The bill was also supported by a small group of physics leaders—Lawrence, Fermi, Oppenheimer, and Arthur Compton. Its provisions placed control of all nuclear research in a part-time commission of military officers appointed by the president. It emphasized secrecy and the military control of research; it called for the continued development of nuclear weapons over economic uses of nuclear energy as the primary goal of American policy; and it incorporated only few patent protections against the industrial monopolization of nuclear power and related applications by a few leading corporations.13 Most physicists greeted the May-Johnson Bill with shock and anger. Nuclear weapons, they argued, should be controlled by a civilian agency, nuclear power should also benefit civilian energy needs, and civilian research should not be completely under military control. The bill unleashed Cassidy, D. C. (2011). A short history of physics in the american century : Short history of physics in the american century. Retrieved from http://ebookcentral.proquest.com Created from apus on 2020-02-16 21:28:49. Copyright © 2011. Harvard University Press. All rights reserved. Taming the Endless Frontier 97 a storm of protest, galvanizing an already growing scientists’ movement for the international control of nuclear weapons. Moreover, it forced an irreparable break between the scientists and their leaders in Washington that began to spell the end of the long tradition of a few elite scientistadministrators exercising authority over the affairs of the entire physics community. Protesting scientists descended upon Washington, and organizations including the Federation of Atomic Scientists, the Association of Los Alamos Scientists, and the influential publication Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists began mobilizing public opinion against the bill. Harold Urey told Congress that the May-Johnson Bill “would create a potential dictator of science.” Leo Szilard said the bill seemed aimed at only one purpose: “to make atomic bombs and blast hell out of Russia before Russia blasts hell out of us.”14 Surprised at the physicists’ response, Truman began to entertain alternatives. In December 1945, after working with the scientists, Senator Brien McMahon, with Truman’s support, submitted a bill for an AEC composed instead of a civilian director and five full-time civilian commissioners.15 It would include advisory committees of civilian scientists and engineers, funding for nonclassified basic research in addition to nuclear weapons research (the first commercial reactors did not appear until 1951), and provisions for any patents resulting from federal funding to be held by the federal government rather than by private individuals and corporations. The bill passed in June 1946 and was signed into law at the end of the year. The AEC remained in place until 1974, when it was split into the Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) and the Energy Research and Development Administration. In 1977 the latter became today’s cabinetlevel Department of Energy, responsible, among other things, for maintaining the nation’s nuclear arsenal. The NRC, which still oversees reactors and radiation, has remained an independent federal agency. Truman appointed David Lilienthal, the director of the Tennessee Valley Authority, the hydroelectric power agency, to head the new AEC. One of Lilienthal’s first acts was to appoint the commission’s top advisory panel of civilian experts on nuclear weapons and reactors, the General Advisory Committee. It reflected the new working partnership among academic physicists, industrial engineers, and government officials in matters Cassidy, D. C. (2011). A short history of physics in the american century : Short history of physics in the american century. Retrieved from http://ebookcentral.proquest.com Created from apus on 2020-02-16 21:28:49. 98 Taming the Endless Frontier Copyright © 2011. Harvard University Press. All rights reserved. of nuclear policy, civilian and military. Chaired by J. Robert Oppenheimer, the other members of the General Advisory Committee in 1949 included Fermi, Conant, Rabi, DuBridge, Berkeley chemist Glenn Seaborg, industrialist Hartley Rowe, Cyril Stanley of the University of Chicago, and Hood Worthington, a DuPont engineer.16 Although the AEC was still primarily a nuclear weapons agency subject to presidential and military oversight, the scientists had achieved their goal of establishing civilian input regarding nuclear weapons policy. Between the ONR and the AEC, even more money began flowing into research with even fewer strings attached. Scientists were thinking again about big science. Because accelerators were still considered a branch of nuclear physics, the AEC inherited from Groves and the army oversight of accelerator physics. The leading physicists on the General Advisory Committee, most of whom were veterans of the Manhattan Project, convinced the AEC to begin pouring funds into the construction of expensive new accelerators. The accelerators might have seemed to offer little immediate practical military or commercial value, but Lawrence had used his 1940 accelerator to separate the fi rst batch of fissionable uranium isotope— as fission physics had demonstrated, who knew what might possibly emerge, even from this highly abstract branch of physics? With generous funding from the AEC, in 1947 Isidor I. Rabi, Norman Ramsey, and a consortium of nine universities founded an East Coast accelerator laboratory at Brookhaven on Long Island, New York. By 1948 the AEC was funding the construction of, and fostering competition between, even bigger synchrotrons at Brookhaven and Berkeley designed to reach 3 billion and 6 billion electron volts, respectively. In 1952 Edward Teller and Ernest Lawrence founded the Lawrence Radiation Laboratory at Livermore, California, not far from its parent, Lawrence’s Rad Lab in Berkeley. With Herbert York as director, the new laboratory was intended to serve as competition for the Los Alamos laboratory. Thanks to AEC dollars, by 1953 the United States had two nuclear weapons laboratories, thirty-five accelerators, and eleven research reactors in operation, the most and biggest of any nation. The United States now led the world in civilian and military nuclear research and in the prestigious field of what was now called high-energy physics.17 Cassidy, D. C. (2011). A short history of physics in the american century : Short history of physics in the american century. Retrieved from http://ebookcentral.proquest.com Created from apus on 2020-02-16 21:28:49. Taming the Endless Frontier 99 Copyright © 2011. Harvard University Press. All rights reserved. E x pl oi t i ng At oms for Pe ac e Confident of the newly proclaimed American Century, the United States did not hesitate to use its enormous postwar scientific and technological power, together with its economic and military might, to promote its foreign policy interests abroad. At the end of World War II, most of Europe lay in ruins, economies were in collapse, and populations struggled without adequate food and shelter. One of the four postwar occupation powers in Germany, the United States appropriated any German patents, equipment, and scientists that it found useful for its domestic science and industry, as did the other powers. But as the four powers began to split into Cold War opponents, it was clear that an economic and political power vacuum in Western Germany and Eu rope might easily invite Soviet attempts at control or even occupation. American Marshall Plan money began flowing into the reconstruction of Western Eu rope, not only for humanitarian purposes but more so for creating a joint American-European alliance against Soviet domination. Naturally, the prevailing argument in the United States that the funding of basic research was essential to future economic and military growth applied also to Eu ropean nations. While Vannevar Bush and others helped direct Marshall Plan funds into basic research in Eu rope, Isidor Rabi, who served on an advisory committee to the U.S. occupation authorities, worked toward the reconstruction and revival of German science as an aid to the revival of Western Europe as a whole. As the U.S. representative to the United Nations Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization (UNESCO), Rabi presented a resolution to a meeting of the UNESCO general assembly in June 1950 calling for the establishment of “regional research centers and laboratories.” Because West Germany was still prohibited from engaging in nuclear fission research of any type, including reactors, Rabi suggested the creation of a consortium of Western Eu ropean nations—much like the Brookhaven Laboratory’s consortium of universities—for the support of a single European high-energy accelerator laboratory that could, with initial U.S. assistance, compete on an international level with Soviet and American accelerators.18 After overcoming initial suspicions about American motives, the Europeans eventually accepted, and in 1952 eleven nations created the Cassidy, D. C. (2011). A short history of physics in the american century : Short history of physics in the american century. Retrieved from http://ebookcentral.proquest.com Created from apus on 2020-02-16 21:28:49. 100 Taming the Endless Frontier Copyright © 2011. Harvard University Press. All rights reserved. Conseil Européen pour la Recherche Nucléaire, or CERN, to plan and develop an accelerator facility to be constructed on the French-Swiss border near Geneva, Switzerland. In 1954 the Conseil changed its official name to Organisation Européenne pour la Recherche Nucléaire, or European Organization for Nuclear Research, but it kept the original acronym, CERN. (Future references here will retain current usage: CERN, the European Organization for Nuclear Research.) The efforts to revive European science, and to create CERN as the centerpiece of that revival, helped to put Western Eu rope back on its feet. However, in the Cold War era, writes historian John Krige, these efforts also served “to promote a U.S. scientific and foreign policy agenda in Western Eu rope”: to integrate Western Eu rope into an Atlantic alliance under the control and protection of the American nuclear umbrella. Even though Rabi and colleagues may not have had quite those aims in mind, the building or rebuilding of Eu ropean laboratories aided the American agenda, not only by reviving a strong western Eu rope, but also by enabling American scientists to benefit from any interesting European research and by helping to overcome domestic hostility to U.S. support of foreign research as part of this agenda.19 The utilization of the U.S. lead in science and technology as a foreign policy instrument became clearer in December 1953 when President Eisenhower announced to the General Assembly of the United Nations a new American initiative toward the achievement of world peace, what he called “Atoms for Peace.” Following the end of the Korean War and the death of Stalin in 1953, Eisenhower and his State Department settled on the Atoms for Peace initiative as a means to showcase American superiority and to promote United States nuclear policy for Eu rope while at the same time diffusing European concerns about that policy and pressuring domestic industries to invest in nuclear reactor technology.20 In his address to the United Nations, Eisenhower called upon the Soviet Union and other nuclear nations to work together with the United States to reduce nuclear tensions and to redirect nuclear energy toward “the peaceful pursuits of mankind.” Toward that end, he called, among other things, for the U.N. to establish a new Atomic Energy Agency (now the International Atomic Energy Agency, or IAEA) that would gather donations from nuclear nations of radioactive isotopes and enriched reactor-grade uranium Cassidy, D. C. (2011). A short history of physics in the american century : Short history of physics in the american century. Retrieved from http://ebookcentral.proquest.com Created from apus on 2020-02-16 21:28:49. Copyright © 2011. Harvard University Press. All rights reserved. Taming the Endless Frontier 101 to be distributed to non-nuclear nations. Reactors installed under the auspices of the agency would “provide abundant electrical energy in the power starved areas of the world,” while the isotopes, distributed on a grander scale than was the case in any earlier U.S. program, would benefit medicine and agriculture.21 Eisenhower’s Atoms for Peace program received nearly universal acclamation. Foreign nations welcomed it, both for its peaceful uses of atomic energy and for the economic and scientific benefits it afforded. The American public welcomed it as well, and much good did come of the international cooperation and collaboration. But from the longer historical view, Atoms for Peace again primarily served the United States’ Cold War agenda for Europe. At that time, the United States was shifting from a reliance on conventional forces to defend Eu rope against a potential Soviet invasion to a less costly nuclear defense that required the nuclearization of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) nations under American oversight. But not all nations were eager to comply with the American nuclear agenda. Britain was already nuclear, and France was developing its own nuclear arsenal, and both had their own foreign policy plans. Prominent West German scientists successfully mobilized German public opinion against an independent German nuclear weapons program. Germany, the likely battleground if the Soviet Union did invade Western Europe, has remained militarily non-nuclear ever since. The building of peaceful reactors in Europe helped to divert foreign public concern and reluctance during the controversial transition to reliance on nuclear deterrence. At the same time, the delivery of isotopes for research and peaceful applications helped to ensure American access to foreign research for monitoring and utilization, while the arrangement of international scientific meetings provided rare opportunities for assessing the capabilities and activities of Soviet scientists and those from other nations for intelligence purposes.22 Isidor Rabi, then chairman of the AEC’s General Advisory Committee, initiated and helped organize the most famous of the international meetings to arise from the Atoms for Peace program, the U.N. International Conference on Peaceful Uses of the Atom, fi rst held in Geneva in August 1955. Its purpose was to provide scientists from both sides of the Cold Cassidy, D. C. (2011). A short history of physics in the american century : Short history of physics in the american century. Retrieved from http://ebookcentral.proquest.com Created from apus on 2020-02-16 21:28:49. Copyright © 2011. Harvard University Press. All rights reserved. 102 Taming the Endless Frontier War the opportunity to meet for the first time since the onset of hostilities and to exchange ideas and information on the peaceful uses of the atom. The conference helped to reduce political tensions and public fears about nuclear war, and it helped to stimulate international cooperation through the IAEA, which is still active today in monitoring nuclear proliferation. But it also provided the Americans with new insights into Soviet science that, if anything, increased their fears about Soviet capabilities. Far from the American stereotype of Soviet scientists as incompetent ideologues, Soviet physicists turned out to be highly capable researchers who delighted in the respect shown them by their Western colleagues. In addition to being impressed, their colleagues were shocked to learn of Soviet plans to challenge the American lead in one of the most prized symbols of scientific superiority, accelerator physics. The Soviets were planning the construction of a huge machine capable of producing particle energies reaching 10 billion electron volts, far in excess of the energies then attained by the biggest American machines. Noting that “the Soviet Union has challenged our leadership,” physicist Frederick Seitz leapt into action. He demanded that the Department of Defense, which provided 74 percent of federal research funds that year, establish a new high-energy physics funding program in addition to the program already funded by the AEC. It is “essential that the United States retain its leadership in all essential parts of the field,” the solid-state physicist informed the military leaders.23 Defense of America’s lead in this field in particular was so important that, in his view, it was a potential matter of military concern. Mobi l i z i ng M a l e s As federal funds flooded into domestic research after the war, American scientists became not only the best funded of the industrialized world, but also the most numerous—further enhancing their influence on the world stage. The demand for physicists in postwar industry and academe rose sharply, and with it the number of new PhDs. The Great Depression was over, demand for consumer goods was up, and the GI Bill was sending an army of war veterans to colleges and universities. The annual production of new physics PhDs jumped from 47 in 1945 to 500 in 1950, and it Cassidy, D. C. (2011). A short history of physics in the american century : Short history of physics in the american century. Retrieved from http://ebookcentral.proquest.com Created from apus on 2020-02-16 21:28:49. Copyright © 2011. Harvard University Press. All rights reserved. Taming the Endless Frontier 103 remained there approximately until the end of the 1950s.24 According to data compiled by Rossiter (see Table 3 in the Appendix), by the mid-1950s the number of physicists and astronomers in the United States was 11,452. Of these it is estimated that one fourth were in academia and three fourths in industry. An analysis of the institutions producing physics PhDs during the 1950s reveals that the same top ten institutions that produced the most PhDs during the 1930s (accounting for 50 percent of all physics PhDs) were also among the top ten during the 1950s (now producing 40 percent of all PhDs). It was no accident that in both decades they were also among the largest recipients of federal and corporate funding. During the 1950s the top two PhD-producing institutions were UC Berkeley and MIT, and each produced nearly twice as many physics doctorates (339 and 303, respectively) as each of the other institutions.25 The demand for new doctorates and the flow of money into research also had a significant impact on the demographic makeup of the postwar physics profession. The war had brought large numbers of women, as substitutes for male workers, into broad areas of the nation’s economy. During the early postwar years, many women, including those working in scientific fields, remained temporarily in place while the returning veterans, taking advantage of the GI Bill, obtained further education. The onset of the Cold War, beginning with the Berlin Blockade in 1948, followed by the outbreak of the Korean War in 1950, reinforced the government’s policy of maintaining the nation’s economy and its science on a permanent war footing. With the universal military draft of men still in place and a monthly quota of new inductees reaching 50,000 per month in 1950, a year later President Truman called for the establishment of a permanent standing army of 3.5 million men. In view of the demands for both soldiers and scientists, the nation could not afford to ignore its underutilized human resources: women and minorities. The Office of Defense Mobilization (ODM), located in the President’s executive office, called for mobilizing women and minorities for careers in science and engineering (though not for military ser vice) and for employers to employ them. The NSF and ODM undertook a number of statistical studies of the nation’s scientific manpower, of great value to us today, and a host of articles in science publications called for increased training of female scientists and engineers. More access to science for Cassidy, D. C. (2011). A short history of physics in the american century : Short history of physics in the american century. Retrieved from http://ebookcentral.proquest.com Created from apus on 2020-02-16 21:28:49. 104 Taming the Endless Frontier Copyright © 2011. Harvard University Press. All rights reserved. women and minorities remained the government’s official policy for nearly a decade. An ODM report in 1952 recommended that employers “reexamine their personnel policies and effect any changes necessary to assure full utilization of women and members of minority groups having scientific and engineering training.”26 Nevertheless, Margaret Rossiter has found that the new policy remained little more than empty rhetoric. There were no federal incentives or enforcement to back up the federal recommendations. By 1954–1955 women were being encouraged to enter science teaching rather than science research. By 1960 opposition to the recommendations had already mounted.27 Rossiter has compiled a wealth of information and statistics from the NSF and other “manpower” studies that portray once again the continuing underrepresentation of women in physics and other sciences during the decades following World War II, despite the obvious need for their participation in the nation’s science and engineering. (Data on minorities are not currently available.) Table 3 in the Appendix displays the steady growth in the number of scientists and engineers and in the number of physicists and astronomers in the United States from 1955 to 1970 (data for these disciplines were combined). Much of this occurred, of course, in reaction to the launch of the Soviet Sputnik satellite in 1957. The number of scientists/engineers and physicists/astronomers roughly tripled during that period, as did the number of men in each category. But even though the number of women in both categories roughly quadrupled, the increase in their percentage representation was far more modest. The representation of women physicists and astronomers during the massive build up of science and engineering after the war, then again after Sputnik, still remained at about the same percentage of the profession in 1970 as it had been in 1938 and even in 1921! (Compare Table 1 in the Appendix.) With the prevalent stifling stereotypes of family and gender during the 1950s, women were still discouraged from entering science and were apparently still considered unsuited for scientific research. Rossiter showed further that, despite the overall burst in the number of science doctorates during the period from 1948 to 1961, female scientists received only about 8 percent of the doctorates awarded in science. In the Purdue University chemistry department, for instance, the number of women students and their choice of specialties were severely limited be- Cassidy, D. C. (2011). A short history of physics in the american century : Short history of physics in the american century. Retrieved from http://ebookcentral.proquest.com Created from apus on 2020-02-16 21:28:49. Copyright © 2011. Harvard University Press. All rights reserved. Taming the Endless Frontier 105 cause so few professors were willing to take on a female student. Only 115 of the over 6,000 physics doctorates in that period went to women, a mere 1.87 percent. The most popular doctoral fields for women were psychology, biosciences, and even chemistry, but women were still vastly underrepresented in those fields as well. While, as noted earlier, the University of California at Berkeley and MIT awarded by far the most PhDs in physics, only Berkeley (appearing together with UCLA) is in the list compiled by Rossiter of the top twenty-five institutions awarding science doctorates to women, including doctorates in “physics and meteorology.”28 The employment picture reflected a parallel underrepresentation of women physicists in both industry and academe. Even as the numbers of male and female physicists in industry increased during the years 1958 to 1968, female representation still dropped over that decade from 1.51 percent to just 1.41 percent. By 1970 about 38 percent of women scientists employed in industry or academe were engaged in teaching, about a third were employed in research, and only about 9 percent worked in management.29 The early decades of the Cold War and the efforts to mobilize science and scientists in defense of the nation and its culture clearly did not extend to women, and least of all to African Americans and other minorities. In 1973 Shirley Ann Jackson graduated from MIT, the first African-American female doctorate in physics. Herman Russell Branson was one of the first male African-American doctorates in physics when he graduated from the University of Cincinnati in 1939. Despite the nation’s needs and the government’s recommendations, women scientists achieved only minimal gains in the still largely white-male dominated disciplines of physics and of science in general. Cassidy, D. C. (2011). A short history of physics in the american century : Short history of physics in the american century. Retrieved from http://ebookcentral.proquest.com Created from apus on 2020-02-16 21:28:49. Copyright © 2011. Harvard University Press. All rights reserved. 6 The New Physics World War II and the postwar aftermath brought striking changes to the structure of the physics discipline and to the nature of its work. Not only did the high demand for physicists during the war continue after the war, but also, with money flowing, big projects, big teams, and big budgets became common— a reflection in many ways of the mass production characteristic of the postwar consumer society. As funding increased the number of researchers and the outpouring of their research, the lone researcher tinkering in a laboratory or sequestered in an office with a pad of paper and a pencil had nearly become a thing of the past. Nevertheless, a number of individual researchers and small groups of researchers did manage to make important breakthroughs in this period. Owing to the practical needs of the military and industrial funders of research, many of these breakthroughs occurred on the border of science and technology, as Paul Forman has argued. Yet, even as individuals, their discoveries would not have been possible without the large-scale wartime and postwar research that preceded their work, or the military resources that funded theirs and Cassidy, D. C. (2011). A short history of physics in the american century : Short history of physics in the american century. Retrieved from http://ebookcentral.proquest.com Created from apus on 2020-02-16 21:29:15. The New Physics 107 Copyright © 2011. Harvard University Press. All rights reserved. prior work, or the huge institutional organizations that supported them. As Spencer Weart writes, “American physics was no longer like a small town where everyone knew each other.”1 Now in a big city, some physicists tended to identify more with their local neighborhoods: their individual subdisciplines and local research teams. Through its wartime contributions, theoretical physics had gained by now a status comparable to experimental research. Nevertheless, most of the dividends of postwar research accrued instead to experimental physics as the result of the wartime successes.2 Those dividends and the impetus of the MIT Radiation Laboratory also enabled the emergence of a new physics discipline that drew adherents from a number of related disciplines. As early as 1944 the American Physical Society established the Division for Solid-State Physics, a division that drew together academic and industrial physicists in the study of the properties of solids, their quantum origins, and their practical uses. (Today, with the inclusion of liquids, the field is known as condensed-matter physics.) Spencer Weart has described how this field emerged and established itself by 1960—with the direct help of the Office of Naval Research (ONR) and the Department of Defense— as an independent discipline with its own journals, textbooks, meetings, prizes, and buildings, first in the United States and then in Europe and abroad.3 “The C rys ta l M a z e ” Following the development of microwave radar during the war, a number of university and industrial laboratories began investigating semiconductor crystals after the war as the basis for developing smaller and more efficient electronic components to replace vacuum tubes. They already had experience during the war with one solid-state component, a crystal diode rectifier able to withstand the high “back voltages” required for the detection of microwave radar beams (as the standard radio-wave vacuum tubes of the day became unstable at these voltages). In 1942 the MIT Radiation Laboratory had awarded an Office of Scientific Research and Development subcontract to the Purdue University physics department for supplemental work on the development of a suitable diode rectifier. Austrian born and educated department head Karl Lark-Horovitz had gained experience Cassidy, D. C. (2011). A short history of physics in the american century : Short history of physics in the american century. Retrieved from http://ebookcentral.proquest.com Created from apus on 2020-02-16 21:29:15. 108 The New Physics Copyright © 2011. Harvard University Press. All rights reserved. with crystal-diode radio during World War I, but vacuum tubes had long since replaced diodes in radio technology. While the MIT Rad Lab investigated silicon, the Purdue team under Lark-Horovitz worked in a different direction—toward the investigation of the still little-researched element germanium as the basis for the needed rectifier. Germanium and silicon are normally insulators, but researchers at the Sperry Gyroscope Company had gained the fi rst evidence that by “doping” germanium and silicon with certain impurities they could create so- called n-type and p-type “semiconductors” that can transmit currents of either negative or positive charges, respectively. Because of this, the electrical properties could be easily controlled and used for a variety of purposes. Purdue physicists undertook careful studies of this effect in germanium. By spring 1943 they had produced the first high back-voltage germanium diode. The MIT Rad Lab assigned mass production of this early device to Bell Telephone Laboratories.4 The Purdue team continued to perfect high back-voltage germanium rectifiers, contributing to the development of the more commonly utilized version, and they investigated theoretically and experimentally the electronic properties of germanium in general. By the end of the war, the department was even producing its own stock of high-purity germaniumcrystal ingots for further research. Theorist Vivian A. Johnson, who played a key role in the Purdue germanium research, reported that at the end of the war the group decided “to abandon development of detectors and the practical applications and to concentrate on the basic investigation of germanium semiconductors.” Following the declassification of their work, the Purdue physics department found itself on the forefront of solid-state research. As other universities and laboratories joined the work on germanium and other semiconductors, in January 1946 Lark-Horovitz reported for the first time on the physics of germanium to an overflow audience at the annual meeting of the American Physical Society. The Purdue work played a vital role not only in advancing solid-state research but also in a discovery soon to emerge from Bell Telephone Laboratories. In 1945 Bell Laboratories became the first and for many years the only institution to establish an entire department dedicated solely to the study of solid-state physics. Mervin Kelly, the director of research, stated that with the utilization of quantum mechanics, “a unified approach to all of Cassidy, D. C. (2011). A short history of physics in the american century : Short history of physics in the american century. Retrieved from http://ebookcentral.proquest.com Created from apus on 2020-02-16 21:29:15. Copyright © 2011. Harvard University Press. All rights reserved. The New Physics 109 our solid state problems offers great promise.”5 One of the solid-state problems for the new department was to move beyond crystal diodes to the development of a solid-state triode amplifier to replace the commonly used vacuum-tube amplifiers still used in long-distance telephone service. Within the new department, William Shockley, a physics graduate of Caltech and MIT, headed the semiconductor division, which included John Bardeen and Walter Brattain. Shockley and Brattain, adept in experimental solid-state physics, had worked during the war at Columbia University on submarine detection under contract to the Office of Scientific Research and Development. Bardeen, a theoretical physicist from Princeton, had worked at the Naval Ordnance Laboratory during the war. Because of Purdue’s pathbreaking work on germanium, they focused on germanium rather than silicon as the basis for their new device. Utilizing quantum theory and doped germanium crystals supplied by Purdue, their research led Bardeen and Brattain in 1947 to the discovery, briefly put, that a small electric current emitted onto the surface of a germanium crystal diode is amplified after passing through the semiconductor. The device was called the point-contact “transistor,” named because it transmitted or resisted current depending on the voltage at the base of the crystal. The new device and its later improvements enabled the replacement of vacuum tubes by much more reliable, smaller, more energy-efficient solidstate electronics. With Shockley’s participation, in 1951 the team joined together three doped germanium crystals into what became today’s triode “junction transistor.” It proved more mechanically stable and much easier to manufacture than the point-contact device. Shockley, Bardeen, and Brattain received the 1956 Nobel Prize for physics “for their researches on semiconductors and their discovery of the transistor effect.” 6 The transistor could be used not only as an electronic amplifier but also, through its off and on states controlled by the voltage on its base, as a switching device of use in telephone connections as well as logic circuits. The off and on states provided an electronic representation of the digital binary numbers 0 and 1. In 1959 Jack Kilby, an engineer at Texas Instruments, constructed the first transistor-based circuit on a single wafer of germanium crystal. A year later, Robert Noyce, a physicist at Fairchild Semiconductor, invented the photolithography technique for producing electronic microcircuits Cassidy, D. C. (2011). A short history of physics in the american century : Short history of physics in the american century. Retrieved from http://ebookcentral.proquest.com Created from apus on 2020-02-16 21:29:15. 110 The New Physics on a semiconductor cry...
Purchase answer to see full attachment