A history of the University of Liverpool's synchrocyclotron - the last big particle physics machine in the UK. There's a great section on a heated discussion of the magnet's polarity.
It takes a society with a good deal of optimism about the future to build such devices .. particularly when they're rebuilding.
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Funding for the new accelerator was granted to the university in 1946 in acknowledgment of the work that Chadwick and other Liverpool physicists did on the Manhattan project. “When you look and see the deprivation after the war, this machine had priority money from the government, so it’s clear how important it was,” says Mike Houlden, a retired physicist from the university who first studied there during the final years of the accelerator’s operation. The synchrocyclotron itself cost £500,000, and the building that housed it is listed as having cost £235,000 – a considerable investment in a country heavily hit during the war. Taking inflation into account, the synchrocyclotron would have cost the equivalent of almost £28.5m today.
“The country was still recovering from the war, so it was amazing that the government had prioritized building a particle accelerator in 1947 and 1948,” Houlden adds, pointing out an image of the Liverpool skyline at the time of the accelerator’s construction in 1951 that shows cranes in the city still repairing damage from German bombing.
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two physicists confronted with the end
Enrico Fermi and John von Neumann had very different reactions when they learned they would die of cancer. Subrahmanyan Chandrasekhar knew both and was asked to comment in an interview:
05:30 in General Commentary, history of science, Religion | Permalink | Comments (0)