Them i had some of the sections of the book that really stood out, i understood why this is an important book and i think a lot of people will, particularly conservatives, begin to appreciate the struggle is an over and the fight isnt done. We have a lot more fight in it but weve got to put ourselves fully into the game. And to enjoy it and be happy about it and grateful that were in the position of leadership. Reagan talked about the happy warrior and this is the manuscript for the happy warrior. It has been a real joy and pleasure to sit down with you and be with you again and to share with everyone this book. The conservative heart. Thank you. Youre happy warrior and have been an inspiration to me. You got a my friend. Good luck on the book. That was after words book tv Signature Program in which authors of the latest nonfiction books are interviewed by journalist, Public Policy makers and others from mail your with their material. After words airs every weekend on the tv. At ten pm on saturday, 12 and 9 00 p. M. On sunday and 12 00 a. M. On monday. You can also watch after words online. Go to book tv. Org and click on after words in the book tv series and topics list on the upper right side of the page. Youre watching the tv. Next, Pulitzer Prize winning journalist Michael Hiltzik recalls when the federal government got involved in scientific and technological endeavors. Good evening everyone. We will get started. My name is candace, i work with the events here and we have a lot of events coming up this fall. I encourage you to grab one of our print calendars on your way out tonight and sign up for our email list at the info desk as well as look online for some of the events coming up in september. As for tonights event, first thing if you would check again and make sure your self owns are on silent or are off so that doesnt disrupt her time here. What we are going to do is have about a one hour event. At the time the presentation for our speaker and half the time for questions. If you wouldnt mind directing your questions to the microphone, we are recording. Recording. Cspan is here and it helps us catch your recording, catch your question on the recording so it makes for a more full recording. After words we will have a signing and they will go down the aisle and the signing will happen right up front here. The books are for purchase behind the register if you havent gotten one are ready. Once we are all finished before we reform that line, if you wouldnt mind holding up the chairs and setting them against the chairs, that chairs, that would be really helpful for us for cleanup. Now it is my pleasure to introduce Michael Hiltzik and his newest book big science. This is a story of a man who ushered in a new era in science moving away from the quote unquote small science of individuals in their labs on low budgets to milliondollar projects or even billiondollar projects that we see today. Such projects have led science and the government and big private wealth for advancement. This science is conducted and made way for triumphant developments that were very large for their time and some might say there were some that were even tragic. Big science is a very timely read as this week we reflect on the dropping of the atomic bomb. That decision decision made 70 years ago is still one that is debated today whether or not it was necessary to end the war. In his book we read about controversy as well with the new scientific leap waiting through the fall of world war ii. Tran1 began his career in buffalo new york and went on to write for the l. A. Times. He won the Pulitzer Prize in 1999 for the articles he wrote on corruption in bride in the music industry. He also wrote hoover dam and of the new deal, a modern history. Please help me in welcoming Michael Hiltzik. [applause]. Thank you candace for that gracious introduction. Thank you to politics and prose for hosting me here tonight. Its great to be here at yet another great independent bookstore. Thanks to all of you for joining me tonight to take maybe in our respite from president ial politics to talk about science and big science and its achievements and limitations. As candace alluded to, and this this is a pertinent subject tonight i think because we find ourselves sandwiched between these two rather tragic anniversaries. As im sure youve been reading yesterday, august 6 was the anniversary of the atomic bombing of hiroshima and sunday will be the anniversary of the bombing of nagasaki. I want to approach these two events in a different way because they were so fundamentally connected with the work of Ernest Orlando lawrence. And the paradigm of the Scientific Research he paradigm to. We will see the relationship between scientists and society because of how it led to scientists placing in humankinds hands the tools of its own destruction. Lets begin by talking about the man himself. Who was Ernest Lawrence . The short answer is during his lifetime during 1901 to 1958 he was the most famous americanborn scientists in the country. In 1937, he country. In 1937, he appeared on the cover of Time Magazine that all purpose, validation of International Celebrity in the prehistoric era that we think of today is the age of print. In 1939 as a professor at berkeley he received a nobel prize on physics. He was the first scientist from an american pub. University to win the prize. If youve been on the Berkeley Campus you mightve noticed that here and there there are parking spots that are designated and that special parking and thats worth a lot in california. All of this for the sign of norwegian american family. He was born in this small town in south dakota. You could say he came from the heartland and he grew up with the 20th century. The source of all his renowned was his inspired invention the cyclotron. It was a device that could bombard the atomic nucleus with energies that his fellow physicist could only dream of in the name of a looser date in the miseries of the subatomic world. His overarching legacy was a new way of doing science. We call it big science. Capitalintensive, multi disc been research which came with tens of thousands or hundreds of thousands of researchers working together in government and industry. Big science science is all around us today. Highlevel Research Funded by the nia to the National Science foundation which received nearly 40 billion a year in government appropriations. Thats big science. The effort to put a man on the moon to send probes into the farthest reaches of the solar science, thats big science. The human the human genome project was a 3 billion exercise in big science that help to launch not only new fields of study, but also new industry. Solving current Climate Change, we will be able to do that without big science. The cyclotron is the epitome today of a big science does lice. Its the latest generation of the first cyclotron that was developed more than eight decades ago. His first cyclotron cost less than 100 in material and fit in the palm of his hand. Its offspring today, is 17 miles insert conference, buried under the french and swiss countryside and built at a cost of 9 billion. You can see today the evolution of this paradigm that started at berkeley. The central theme of my book in the conversation this evening once we open the floor to all of you to ask questions and discuss is that big science raises as many questions about humankind thirst for knowledge as it answers. One of the most important aspects of this method of research that we are still grappling with 70 years on is that it did give scientists and society access to forces of truly destructive power. Forces that we have found very hard but we hope not impossible to control. One one of the first physicists to warn of the implication of this change in the way we do research was lawrences own colleague, a german physicist who, two months before the first atomic bomb detonated over japan, observed that the age was are ready past in which, as he put it, scientist could disclaim direct responsibility for the use to which mankind has put their disinterested discoveries. The reason frank said was that with big science had brought about greater dangers than all the inventions of the past put together. But we need to talk tonight not only what we do with the knowledge, but the resources we devote to that quest his legacy challenges us to think about how to weigh the monumental high profile efforts that it might take to put a human being on mars or discover the next particle against the necessity of fighting cancer or painfree drugs against hepatitis or multiple sclerosis for every seven. All of this together factors into what makes lawrence such an intriguing personality for us today. That brings us back to the invention that made his name. It was 1929 and he had just recently joined the faculty of the university of california at berkeley and physics was at a crossroads. The departing generation, the older generation of scientists like marie curie had been probing the atomic nuclears with the tools that nature gave them. The omission of alpha and beta raise from radioactive waves. With those tools that generation had figured out the structure of the atom, discovered xrays and radioactivity. They had done about as much as they could with natures gift and to go further, they understood, science would need probes of much Higher Energy to delve deeper into the nuclears. This could could only be achieved by applying human ingenuity. It was rutherford who threw down the challenge for the new generation calling for an apparatus that could deliver a projectile of 10 million electron volts yet be safely accommodated in a mediumsized room scientists all over the world took up his challenge but they discovered when you load an apparatus with 10 million volts, what happens is you blow up the apparatus think of trying to fire a mortar shell out of a cannon made of cardboard. Laboratories laboratories filled up with shards of splintered glass, one group of intrepid german researchers struck a cable between two alpine peaks and they did but in the process one was blasted off the mountain and that ended that. One night in berkeley he had a brainstorm. What if you dont put the voltage on the apparatus itself but build it up incrementally on on if you start with a proton for a hundred volts. If you give it 100v jolt now it has the energy of 200 jolt. Hundred jolt. And so on and so on. Now a Linear Accelerator decide to keep delivering these jolts by us think sequence of electrodes would have to be quite large, and not fitting into his comfortably sized room. Here comes the second part of his brainstorm. He knows how to charge particle and it will follow a curved path. You can bend it into a spiral, allowing it to get repeated jolts from just a single electrode. Thats the essence of the cyclotron boiled down to its simplest state. Then all you have to do is aim it at a target and let it go. The possibilities are endless and it all could fit into a mediumsized room. At least the first cyclotron did. Lawrence knows hes onto something. The very next day he was seen bounding across the campus and declaring im going to be famous and so he was in the next decade his invention proved itself to be a spectacular useful and flexible machine. The the team he assembled in berkeley discovered scores of new isotopes. Carbon14 which we know as the key to carbon dating was discovered through the cyclotron. Other isotopes became the foundation of the new science of Nuclear Medicine and the sources of new cures and new therapeutic processes that we still used today and then came the new element, heavier than uranium. Elements we could have never in their natural state. Element 93 and element 94 which was named after what was thought to be the next planet in the solar system. Pluto was called plutonium. Every discovery opened and lawrence responded by doing new cyclotrons, each one bigger and more powerful and much more expensive than the last. Soon every university that aspired to the first rank of Research Institution wanted its own cyclotron. Lawrence was happy to oblige sending his associates into the world showing them how to do it in freely showing his own designs all in the name of expanding what became his cyclotron empire. It wasnt only his real scientific accomplishment but his personality as well. So perfect for a country striving to emerge from the shadow of european scientific tradition. He was useful and engaging. Very different from from the popular image of the Mad Scientist locked away in his lap with wild hair and a little bit strange. Ernest was sober, businesslike and very down to earth. He. He went to bed and threepiece suits. The editor went to visit him at berkeley and came home enthralled by this energetic man who was amazingly easy to talk to and completely american as apple pie. Then, as i said in 19391939 he won the nobel prize for the cyclotron. But he demonstrated more than scientific technique. He showed great managerial technique. He showed when you needed to raise millions of dollars to build your machine you had to have the genius of an entrepreneur, ring master, a ceo. You had to raise money from University President s, foundation boards, egg industrial executives and government officials by serving their own goals without compromising your own too much. For scientist this was a new religion and Ernest Lawrence was a prophet. Well the 1939 nobel prize were the last to be awarded until the war dissipated four years later. Now we come to the central event in lawrences career. The Manhattan Project would validate the big science paradigm. The atomic bomb could not have been invented by a solitary physicist using handmade equipment. It required an an investment of billions of dollars. Many science and technicians and laboratories built on an industrial scale. Manhattan project was the first great Big Science Program and approved how powerful an approach this could be while hinting at how hard its results might be to control. Many of you, no doubt, no at least the outline of the making of the atomic bomb. The effort starting with Albert Einstein famous letter to Franklin Roosevelt in august 1939, actually written by the hungarian physicists and signed by einstein. Saying that the recent discovery implied that bombs could be constructed from uranium and warning that nazi germany might already be working on the problem. That fear brought government and the community of physicist together to make sure we would get the bomb first. Lawrence and big science would play a big paramount role in that effort. The cyclotron was an essential component in the research leading to the bomb. Lawrence converted his newest cyclotron, of the myth still behemoth still being built. Then he designed and supervised the plant to manufacture the product in tennessee known as oak ridge. That plant would produce every atom of the uranium for the bomb that was dropped on their shema. He gave one of his hiroshima that became the core of the bomb that destroyed nagasaki. When they came around looking for someone to head up the design of the bomb, Ernest Lawrence nominated his close friend and colleague at berkeley and got him the job. But now we must turn to the moral dimensions of this work. Not only lawrences lawrences role but big sciences role in is still something that is the big subject of debate. The study of history you know is an exercise in looking at events through the eyes of people who lived them but also applying the perspective of the decades, sometimes the century. This exercise is especially complicated with Nuclear Weapons because we are so familiar with their consequences we know the toll where at least 100 30,000 people in the very first days, perhaps that many more overtime. The toll the builders of the bomb could only guess at and they probably underestimated the figures. We know of the horrific longterm suffering of the civilian survivors of those cities unlike anything anyone else has experienced as were survivors in history. We know the cloud that civilization has lived under because of the decision made in the 1940s to unleash the destructive capacity of the atomic nucleus. We know the nazis actually never did have a working Atomic Bomb Program. Scientist who stayed behind in germany got the physics of the bomb wrong and concluded it could not be built and did not try. The allies didnt learn that until after the war was over. Now i dont mean by all of this that we shouldnt judge the scientists of the Manhattan Project at all, only that we should temper our judgment by what they thought they knew. A thought they were building a weapon that could shorten the war and maybe even save lives. They thought they were in a race with a homicidal maniac on world domination. They were focused on the emergency of the immediate present. Germany surrendered in 1945 and that change the calculus but not the momentum of this effort. Unlike germany, japan was not widely feared as a potential Nuclear Threat and its regime was not seen as fixed on world domination. But by then the bombs were nearly complete. The impulse to use them was very strong. In fact the plans were already ready and pointed on japan. The final debate among scientists and military and political leaders before was over whether dropping the bombs on the unsuspecting japanese was truly necessary or whether it demonstration over a desert or on populated area could deliver a message to the japanese regime. The record tells us that the last holdout against dropping the bombs was lawrence himself that eventually he to a knowledge the risks of a dad was too great and the demonstration that didnt demonstrate anything would be worse than no demonstration at all. Historians have debated ever sense and we still debate today whether the bombing of japan was truly necessary to secure surrender but there can be no question really that most of the people directly involved in the decision accepted the assumption that it wa