About scientific technological endeavors. [inaudible conversations] good evening, everyone. Were going to get started. My name is candace. I work with the events here at politics and prose. We have a lot of events coming up. I encourage you grab a calendar on the way out tonight. Sign up for the email list as well as look automobile for events in online for events in september. Tonight, first thing you check again to make sure your cell phones are on silent or off so that doesnt distract our time here. What well do is have about an hourlong event, half the time presentation from our speaker and then half the time for questions. We have a microphone over here. If you wouldnt mind directing your question to that mic, we are recording. Cspan is here, and it helps us to catch your question on the recording. So, makes for a more full recording. And then afterwards well have a signing withll form a line going down this aisle and signing will happen right up front here. The books are for purchase behind the register if you havent gotten one already. Once we are finished, before we start the line, if you could fold up your chairs and set them against the shelfs that would be helpful. Enough its my pleasure to introduce Michael Hiltzik his book pick science earnest lawrence and the invention that launched the military industry complex. I the story of man who moved away from the small scenes of individuals and their labs on low budgets to Million Dollar projects such as the cyclotron that lawrence won a nobel prize for in 19390. Billion dollar projects we see today, such as the collider. Such projects have led science into the direction of looking to government and big private wealth for advancement. This shift in the way science was and now is conducted made way for a triumphant development that were very large for their time. Some might say there were some that were even tragic. Big signs is a timely read as this week we reflect on the dropping of the atomic bomb on hiroshima and nagasaki. That decision made is still one debated today, whether or not it was necessary to end the war, and in mr. Hiltziks book we read about controversy as well, with the new scientific elite wading through the political fallout that followed world war ii. Mr. Hiltzik began his journalism career in buffalo, new york, and went on from there to wry extensively for the los angeles times. He won the pulitzer prizin 1999 for the ors he wrote on corruption and bribes in the music industry. A couple of his previous books include colossus, hoover dam and the making of the american understands, and the new deal, modern history. So please help me in welcoming Michael Hiltzik to politics and prose ex [applause] well, thank you, candace, for that gracious introduction, and thanks to politics and prose for hosting me here tonight. Its great to be here at yet another great independent book store. And thanks to all of you for joining me tonight to take maybe an hours respite from president ial politics to talk about science and big science and its achievements and limitations, and as can cancan das alluded to this is a pertinent subject tonight because we find ourselves sandwiched between two tragic anniversaries. August 6th was the 70th 70th anniversary of the atomic bombing of hiroshima, and sunday is the an anniversary of the bomb offering nagasaki. I want to approach these events in a different way. They were so fundamentally connected with the work of Ernest Lawrence, the physicist at the center of the book, and to the paradigm of Scientific Research that he pioneered. And well see how his work launched a new phase in the relationship between scientists and society because of how it led to scienceists placing in human beingkinds hands the tools of its own destruction. So let begin we talking about the man himself who was Ernest Lawrence. Well, the short answer is that during his lifetime, from 1901 to 1958, he was the most famous americanborn scientist in the country. In 1937, he appeared on the cover of Time Magazine that all purpose validation of International Celebrity back to the era we think of as the age of print. And in 1939, as a prefer at berk professor at berkeley he received the nobel prize in physics, and if you have been on the Berkeley Campus you might notice here and there there are parking spots designated n. L. This is a perk that Nobel Laureates get and in california thats worth a lot. All this for the son of a norwegian american family, born in the small town of canton, south dakota. So you could say he came from the heartland and he grew up with the 20th century. The source of all his renown was his inspired invention, the psychiatrytron, a device that could woman bard the atomic nucleus with energy that his fellow physicists could only dream of the name of elucidating the mysteries of the atom yankee world. His legacy was a new way of doing science. We call is big science. Capital intensive, Multidisciplinary Research in which teams of tens or hundreds or even thousands of researchers Work Together with funding from foundations, government, and industry. Big science is all around us today. High level reself furnishedded be the ni and the National Science foundation, which receives nearly 40 billion a year in government appropriations. Thats big science. The effort to put man on the moon, to send probes into the farthest reaches of the solar system, thats big science. The human genome project was a 3 billion exercise in big science that helped to launch not only new fields of study but also new industries. Solving climate change, we wont be able to do that without big science. The large collider which discovered the elusive subatomic particle is the epitomy of a big science device. The latest generation of the first cyclotron that Ernest Lawrence invented more than eight decades ago. His first cyclotron cost less than 100 in material and fit in the palm of his hand. Its off spring today occupies a tunnel 17miles in circumference, buried under the french and swiss countrysides and built at a cost of 9 billion. So you can see something, the evolution of this paradigm that started in his lab in berkeley. But the central theme of my book, and i hope of our 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 humankinds thirst for knowledge as it answers. One of the most important aspects of this method of research that were still grappling with, 70 years on, is that it did give scientists and society access to forces of truly tree dee instructive power, forces we found very hard, though we hope not impossible to control. One of the first physicists to warn of the implications of the sea change in the way we do research was lawrences own colleague on the Manhattan Project, james frank, a german physicist, also a nobel laureate, who two months before the first atomic bomb detonated over japan on served the age was already past in which he put it scientists could disclaim responsibility of the use mankind hat put their disinterested recoveries. The reason frank said is what big science brought about was fraught with infinitely greater dangers than were all the i vengeses of the past put together. But we need to talk about not what we do with the knowledge big science brings us but the resources we devote to that quest. Ernest lawrences 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 to discover the next fundamental particle against the necessity of fighting cancer or paying for drugs against hepatitis or multiple clear row sis for every sufferer. So, all this together factors into what makes lawrence such an intriguing personality for us today. And that brings us back to the inning description that made his name. It was 1929. He just recently joined the faculty of the university of kaz aft berkeley and physic was at a crossroads. The departing generation, the older generation, scientist like earnest rutherford and marie currie had been appropriating the atomic nucleus with the tools that nature gave them. The emissions of alpha and beta waves from radium, with those tools, that generation had figured out the structure of the atom, discovered xrays xrays d radioactivity but they had done as much as they could with natures good, and to go further they in other words science would need probes of Higher Energy to delve deeper into the nucleus with more precision and these could only be achieved by applying human ingenuity. Rutherford 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 medium size room. Well, scientists all over the world took up the challenge. But they discovered that when you load an apparatus with ten 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. So laboratories filled up with shards of splintered glass. One group of intrepid germ yap research strung a cable between two alpine peaks to capture lightning and they did, but in the process one of them wassed off the mountain to his death and that ended that. So, one night in berkeley, Ernest Lawrence had a brainstorm. What if you dont put the voltage on to the apparatus itself but build it up incrementally on the projectile. If you start with a proton, say, with 100volts, for the purpose of illustration, you give it 100volt jolt, now its got energy of two 2volts. Another jolt and its 300 and so on and so on. Now, a Linear Accelerator designed to keep delivering overall sink i crowe niced electrode wood have to be a mile in length to achieve the desired energies. Certainly not fitting into rutherfords comfortably sized room. So here comps the second part of lawrences brainstorm. He knows a charged particle traversing a Magnetic Field will follow a curved path. So apply a Magnetic Field to your proton and you can bend it into a spiral, allowing it to get repeated jolts from just a single electrode and thats the essence of the cyclotron boiled down to its simplest terms but after a enough revolutions you have a particle that can carry a million volts, 10 million, even 100 million, even a billion, and then all you have to do is aim it at a target and let it go. The possibilities are limitless and it all could fit into a medium sized room. At least the first cyclotrons could. Well, lawrence knows he is on to something. Very next day he seemed bounding across the Berkeley Campus, button hole holing friends and colleagues to declare, im going to be famous, and so he was. The next decade, his invention proved itself to be a spectacularly useful and flexible machine. The team he assembled in berkeley discovered scores of new isotopes, carbon 14, which is the key to carbon dating, was discovered through the cyclotron. Other isotopes created by cyclotron bombardment became the foundation of the new science of nucleares meds sip, sources souf new cures and now therapeutic processes we use today. And then came the new elements, heavier than, element 93, and element 94 named after what was thought to be the next planet in the solar system, pluto, was called plutonium. And every discovery opened, and lawrence responded by designing new cyclotrons, even one picker and more powerful and much more expensive than the last. And soon every university that aspired to the first rank of Research Institutions wanted its own cyclotron, and lawrence was happy to oblige, sending his associates into the world to show them how to do it, freely sharing his own designs, all in the name of expanding what became known as lawrences cyclotron empire. But it wasnt only his real scientific accomplish that made him mouse but his personality. So perfect for a country striving to emerge from the shadow of european scientific tradition. He was youthful and engaging, very different from the popular image of the mad scientist, locked away in his lab, wild haired and foreign and at bit strange. Ernest lawrence was sober, businesslike, very down to earth, midwestern, threepeat suit. An editor to went to visit him and came home enthralled by this man the describe as amazingly easy to talk to and as completely american as apple pie. And then as i said in 1939, lawrence won the nobel prize for the cyclotron. But he demonstrated more than inspired scientific techniques. He showed great managerial techniques. When you needed to raise millions of dollars to build your machine, you had to have the genius of an entrepreneur, a ring master, a ceo. You had to raise money from University President s, foundation boards, industrial executives, and government officials, by serving their own goals without compromising your own too much. For scientists this was new religion, and new Orleans Lawrence was its prophet. Well, the 1939 nobel prizes were the last to be awarded until the war clouds over europe began to dissipate four years later. So, 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 bay solitary physicist using handmade equipment. It required an investment of billions of dollars, armies of scientists and technicians, laboratories built on an industrial scale. The Manhattan Project was the first great Big Science Program and it proved how powerful an approach this could be, while hinting at how hard its results might be to control. Now, many of you no doubt know at least the outlines of the make offering the atomic bomb. The efforts starting with albert einsteins letter to Franklin Roosevelt in august 1939, actually wherein by a hungarian physicist and signed by einstein, observing the recent discovery of Nuclear Fission implied that bombs could be constructed from fissionable uranium and warning that nazi germany might already be working on the problem. And that fear brought government and the community of physicists together to make sure we would get the bomb first. Lawrence and big science would play a paramount role in that effort. The cyclotron was an essential kole opponent in at the research leading to the bomb. Lawrence converted his newest cyclotron, behemoth, still built in a ravine above the Berkeley Campus in a device in which to concentrate fissionable isotope, uranium 235. He designed and supervised the construction of the industrial plant to manufacture the enriched product in a rural district in tennessee known as oak ridge. And that plant would produce every atom of the uranium for the bomb dropped on hiroshima hem gave a priority time on the other cyclotrons to isolate plutonium, the core of the bomb that destroyed nagasaki. And when general leslie groves, the havent of the Manhattan Project, came around looking for someone to head up the actual design of the bomb at the lab that became los alamos, lawrence nominated his close friend, onen home. Er, and got him oppenheimer and got him the job. Now we must turn to the moral dimension of this work, not only laurens role but big sciences role in war. Something that is still the subject of debate today, 70 years later. I think just by reading the papers in this last week. The study of history is an exercise in looking at events through the eyes of the people who lived them but also applying the perspective of the decades, sometime this centuries. This exercise is especially complicated with Nuclear Weapons blahs were so familiar with their consequences. We know the toll in lives from the bombings of hiroshima and nagasaki, at least 130,000 people, maybe 150,000, in the very first days, perhaps that many more over time, a toll that the builders of the bomb could only guess at and probably underestimated the figures. We know of the horrific long areterm suffering of the civilian survivors of those cities, unlike anything experienced by any other survivors of warfare in history. And we know the cloud that civilization has lived under for 70 years because of the decision made in the 1940s to unleash the destructive capacity of the atomic nucleus. And we know that the nazis actually never did have a working atomic bomb program. The scientists who stayed behind in germany got the physics of the bomb ongoing concluded it could not be built and didnt try. But the allies didnt learn that until after the war was over. Now, i dont mean by all this that we shouldnt judge the scientist Manhattan Project at all, only that we should temper our judgment but what they thought they knew. They 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, bent on world domination. They were focused on the emergency of the immediate present. Germanys surrender in 1945 changed 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, maybe regional domination. But by then, the bombs were nearly complete, the impulse to use them was very strong, and in fact the planes were already ready on the island, pointed at japan. The final debate among scientists and military and political leaders before hiroshima was over whether dropping the bombs on the unsuspecting japanese was truly necessary or whether a demonstration over a desert or an unpop lated pacific atoll could deliver a sufficiently compelling message to japanese regime. The record tells us that the last holdout against dropping the bombs was lawrence himself, but that venally he, too eventually he, too, acknowledged the risk of a dud was too grate and apple mon straight that didnt demon disrate anything would be worse than no demonstration at all. Historians debated ever since, in fact we still debate today, whether the bombing of japan was truly neces