Ernest Lawrence

Ernest Orlando Lawrence earned his physics PhD from Yale in 1925 and joined Berkeley three years later, becoming its youngest full professor by 1930. One evening in the library he saw a diagram of a linear accelerator and reimagined it as a circle - particles whipped around between electromagnet poles, gaining speed with each pass. The first cyclotron was born, and Lawrence spent the next decade building bigger ones. His Radiation Laboratory became an official university department in 1936, pioneering both high-energy physics and medical radioisotope research. During World War II he turned the cyclotron's logic into calutrons - electromagnetic separators that enriched uranium for the Manhattan Project at a massive Oak Ridge plant called Y-12. After the war he became the loudest voice for Big Science, pushing for government-funded laboratories and backing Edward Teller's campaign for a second weapons lab, which opened in Livermore in 1952. Lawrence died in 1958; a year earlier he'd won the Nobel Prize, and eventually both labs, and element 103, carried his name.