Big Science

by Michael Hiltzik

  Alvin Weinberg posed three fundamental questions about Big Science: Is it ruining science? Is it ruining the nation financially? Should the money it commands be redirected—spent on eradicating disease and other efforts aimed directly at “human well-being,” for example, rather than on “spectaculars” like space travel and particle physics?

  Merely to ask the questions was to hint that the answers must be affirmative. Big Science thrived on publicity, Weinberg observed, which reduced discussions of technical merit to debates about which projects might make the biggest splash in the press. The surfeit of money for big projects encouraged more building and less thinking: “There is a natural rush to spend dollars rather than thought—to order a $107 [$10 million] nuclear reactor instead of devising a crucial experiment with the reactors at hand.” Weinberg illuminated the uneasiness already emerging about the impact of Big Science on research and the university. “I suspect that most Americans would prefer to belong to the society which first gave the world a cure for cancer,” he wrote, “than to the society which put the first astronaut on Mars.”

  Others expressed concerns about the impact of Big Science on the traditional structure of academia, which melded basic research, applied research, and teaching into a unified yet multifaceted whole. Once physicists’ machines burst the confines of the university campus this relationship began to break down; it was fragmented even further by the dominance of military funding during World War II, the Korean War, and the Cold War. “When the machines outgrew their university environment,” John Bertram Adams told his audience at the Rad Lab’s fiftieth anniversary symposium, “the place where experiments were carried out became separated from the place where students were taught physics . . . It takes a particularly robust personality to teach academic courses at, say, Harvard University and carry the heavy responsibility of a major experiment at, say, Fermilab or CERN, especially when the experiment lasts several years.”

  Big Science was no longer part of the academic institution, but an institution unto itself. Experiments run on billion-dollar machines had to be approved by committees, which based their decisions not only on the objective merits of the proposals but on their subjective judgments of the applicants’ reputations and standing in their fields. The widening gulf between this style of science and the serendipitous research of the past showed how much had been lost with the passing of Ernest Lawrence, indeed of his entire generation. While he was alive and presiding over the Rad Lab, Ernest served as his own experiment committee, guiding research directly through his own demands and indirectly through his choice of top associates—at the Rad Lab, important research often was defined as whatever Ernest Lawrence, Luis Alvarez, or Ed McMillan wished to pursue.

  Ernest Lawrence’s generation comprised scientific statesmen who drew their authority in peacetime from the roles they had played during World War II. By the end of the third decade after the war, many had passed on: J. Robert Oppenheimer in 1967, Arthur Holly Compton in 1962, Vannevar Bush in 1974. No one in the succeeding generation commanded the respect of members of Congress or residents of the White House as they had; none could claim to represent the unified interests of the scientific community as they could; none had the fund-raising skills of an Ernest Lawrence.

  The passing of American science’s greatest and most influential cohort occurred just as demand burgeoned for new accelerators, and as doubts about their necessity began to be heard even among physicists. To the particle physicists who had dominated the science during the cyclotron era, the need for bigger and more energetic machines was an article of faith. “We simply do not know how to obtain information on the most minute structure of matter (high-energy physics) or on the grandest scale of the universe . . . without large efforts and large tools,” wrote Pief Panofsky, the Rad Lab veteran who had become head of Stanford University’s competing high-energy accelerator program, in 1992. The projects, moreover, were all-or-nothing. “Big Science has the special problem that it can’t easily be scaled down,” Steven Weinberg observed. Writing of the new multibillion-dollar accelerators that were designed to send beams of particles in opposite directions around giant underground tunnels and smash them into one another, he stated, “It does no good to build an accelerator tunnel that only goes halfway around the circle.” But not all science was physics, and not all physics was high-energy physics.

  • • •

  As the Manhattan Project’s scientific leaders began to depart the battlefield in the mid-1960s, doubts about scientists’ role in setting national priorities also became stronger. “A 20-year honeymoon for science is drawing to a close,” wrote Science Magazine’s editor, Phil Abelson—former Rad Lab researcher and developer of the thermal diffusion uranium separation process for the atomic bomb—in 1966.

  A grand honeymoon it had been. During those twenty years, a period that started with Hiroshima and received a powerful boost from Sputnik, scientists rose to figures of great consequence in all aspects of political life. Coming out of the war, Vannevar Bush, Ernest Lawrence, and their colleagues were able to persuade Congress that “basic science was worth supporting for its own sake—or at any rate without inquiring too closely about its connection with practical results,” observed Don K. Price, an expert in public administration at Harvard. The Eminent Scientist became a “political animal,” wrote Ralph Sanders, a political scientist at the government’s Industrial College of the Armed Forces, in the pages of the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists. “The President’s Science Advisor now comments upon issues which forty years ago were the exclusive preserve of politicians . . . Hordes of scientists today scamper about the landscape of public affairs, eager to grapple with an increasing range of questions,” given free reign by politicians “dazzled by the brilliant achievements of science, disturbed by the often esoteric nature of science, and bothered by the Soviet challenge in science.” The process had started with Ernest Lawrence, but it had grown immeasurably after his death.

  By then, however, signs of the waning influence of scientists were already emerging. In absolute terms, to be sure, science still commanded an enormous share of national resources: federal government spending on research and development had grown from $74 million in 1940 to $15 billion in 1965, an increase averaging nearly 20 percent a year. But the growth rate had fallen sharply. From 1950 to 1955, the annual growth had been 28 percent; from 1961 to 1965, it was 15 percent.

  This trend surely reflected the sheer impossibility of sustaining the growth rate of the war years and immediate postwar period. But there was more to it. Big Science had allowed its past achievements to be oversold, and its promoters overpromised gains for the future. By the mid-1960s, the successes of wartime were receding into the mists of memory, and the expenses of competing with Russia in the post-Sputnik era began to seem staggering.

  Then came Vietnam. The war placed a heavy strain on government resources; the debate it engendered over America’s role in the world placed a spotlight on the nation’s social priorities; meanwhile the participation of the academic and scientific establishment in the war machine led to new questions about military funding of research. Congress moved to wean academia from the mother’s milk of Pentagon funding. In 1969 the Mansfield Amendment, named for Senate Majority Leader Mike Mansfield, Democrat of Montana, barred the Pentagon from spending money on any research not directly related to the military. The change struck at a host of Big Science university projects funded by the Defense Department’s Sputnik-era Advanced Research Projects Agency, or ARPA—not least among them a network linking university research computers known as the ARPANET, the grandfather of today’s Internet. (In recognition of the change in its mission, ARPA would be renamed the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, or DARPA.) And it was especially hard on physicists, many of whom had based their career aspirations on expectations of continued government funding for Big Science. At MIT, which suffered a 30 percent drop in its government support since 1968, physics chairman Victor Weisskopf lamented in 1972
the declining prospects of “a generation of people who studied physics under the stimulus of Sputnik. As kids in school they were told this was a great national emergency, that we needed scientists. So they worked hard.” Now, he said, “they are out on the street and naturally they feel cheated.”

  Big Scientists tried to push back against the skepticism about their work inspired by the Vietnam debate and their rising budget demands. They resorted to several old justifications for big spending on basic research. They claimed that, given enough money, practical applications from basic science were just around the corner: the conquest of cancer “or heart disease, or stroke, or mental illness, or whatever,” as Harper’s editor John Fischer repeated dismissively—a line, he remarked, overused “to justify research with only remote relevance to the conquest of anything.” Or they projected a military breakthrough, or world domination by the Russians if the US effort in Big Science faltered.

  In this atmosphere of national stringency and reconsidered priorities, Big Science faced challenges unknown in Lawrence’s days. In that era and well into the first postwar decade it had been widely accepted that national pride demanded government funding of the quest for knowledge for its own sake. “The great ideas arise when you give freedom,” declared the Rockefeller Foundation’s Warren Weaver—“freedom to think, freedom from other pressures—to individuals of great intellectual capacity . . . and let them be motivated primarily by their curiosity to find out how nature operates.”

  Now that notion sounded hopelessly elitist. Multimillion-dollar projects aimed at knowledge for its own sake came under increasing practical scrutiny. That was the fate, for instance, of Project Mohole, launched in 1958 as an audacious plan to drill into the Earth’s mantle through the deep ocean floor. Mohole was conceived as a geological analogue to the space race and the exploration of subatomic physics. But it could not survive the mushrooming of its cost estimate to $127 million from the original $15 million. Its promoters had tried to save it by depicting Mohole as “a panacea for virtually everything but poison ivy,” scoffed Science magazine in July 1966, after the project was canceled by Congress.

  No event brought the limits of Big Science into sharp relief in the United States like the bitter debate over the Superconducting Super Collider, the SSC, in the 1980s and early 1990s. An ultramodern descendant of the glass-and-sealing-wax accelerators of Ernest Lawrence and Niels Edlefsen, the SSC was projected to cost $6 billion over ten years. Its supporters’ sales pitch to Congress came straight from Lawrence’s playbook. They evoked national pride, the prospect of discoveries with life-saving applications, the glory of mankind’s search for the fundamental truths of nature. Sheldon Glashow and Leon Lederman, the SSC’s most energetic promoters, wrote that the project would spin off new knowledge about superconducting magnets (useful for “super-rapid transit,” batteries, and electrical transmission), in construction techniques, in computer science. But their bedrock case was a warning that American science risked being outrun by Europe. If America rejected the SSC, they wrote, “the loss will not only be to our science but also to the broader issue of national pride and technological self-confidence. When we were children, America did most things best. So it should again.”

  Yet the SSC camp lacked Lawrence’s ability to hold a lay audience in thrall, and to hold the scientific community together. As early as 1967, the New York Times had decried the “expensive irrelevance” of high-energy accelerators given the pressing social problems of the era (its specific target was a planned new machine at Fermilab). As the SSC campaign progressed, budgetary considerations came to trump the promise of technological spinoffs, national pride, and human aspiration. Steven Weinberg came face-to-face with the challenge during an appearance on the Larry King radio show with an anti-SSC congressman. “He said that he wasn’t against spending on science, but that we had to set priorities,” Weinberg recollected. “I explained that the SSC was going to help us learn the laws of nature, and I asked if that didn’t deserve a high priority. I remember every word of his answer. It was ‘No.’ ” No mere congressman would have dared deliver such a blunt rebuff to Ernest Lawrence in his day.

  The SSC was further undermined by an open split within the physics community over whether it was necessary at all. High-energy physicists like Panofsky and Weinberg said yes, but they were contradicted by those in other branches of the science who had long felt shortchanged by the high-energy group’s voracious appetite for research funding. Finally, in 1993, amid continuing discord over the Superconducting Super Collider’s cost, necessity, and utility, and a deepening economic slump, Congress killed the project.

  Was it a death knell for Big Science? That remains unclear at this writing, decades later. After the SSC’s cancellation, the center of gravity of high-energy physics shifted to CERN and its Large Hadron Collider, which became the world’s most powerful accelerator by default. The LHC keeps thousands of physicists employed, many of them Americans, and in 2013 achieved the signal success of identifying the elusive Higgs boson. But as has been the pattern in physics for about a century, the discovery only pointed the way to more questions about the fundamental particles and forces of nature—questions that might require yet bigger and more powerful machines to answer. “In the next decade,” Steven Weinberg predicted, “physicists are probably going to ask their governments for whatever new and more powerful accelerator we then think will be needed. That is going to be a very hard sell.”

  In the years since the cancellation of the SSC, government’s role in funding Big Science has continued to wane. In the first decades of the twenty-first century, the dominant patron is business, which contributes two-thirds of the funds spent on research and development in the United States. Of that, nearly two-thirds is “development” spending—that is, efforts to bring the results of applied research to market. Only about one of every six dollars spent on R&D goes to basic research. Business was the source of almost all of the increase in funding detected by the National Science Foundation from 2003 through 2008. The future of Big Science appears to depend on industry, whose R&D priorities are very different from those of universities, research foundations, and government.

  • • •

  It was not only the cost and relevance of Ernest Lawrence’s Big Science that came under attack in the years following his death. There was also the issue of the ends that had been served by his style of raising money and deploying scientific talent. The focus of that question was Livermore.

  By the 1980s, Livermore’s increasingly prominent role in the international arms race began to raise disturbing doubts in a home on Tamalpais Road in the hills north of the Berkeley campus. There Molly Lawrence pondered whether her husband’s legacy was being properly served at Livermore. Her conclusion was that Ernest would have disapproved, and she became determined to tell the world.

  Watching the news about a controversial ICBM project one day in 1982, she told a reporter from her local newspaper, “I heard that ‘Lawrence Livermore’ would be designing parts for the MX. Suddenly it hit me how dreadful it was that Ernest’s name was associated with this, was lending legitimacy and respectability to it.” She was convinced that Ernest would be as appalled as she was at how the effort to develop the Super as a matter of national security had become transformed into an escalating race to produce destructive power without limits. He would have been angered, she said, by “the middle-class idiots who refuse to face the horror we’ve brought upon ourselves, refuse to try and stop the madness when we have ten to twenty times what we need for deterrence.”

  That spring she wrote to the University of California regents, expressing her “shame and remorse” at Ernest’s identification with Livermore and asking that his name be removed from the lab. The regents demurred, telling her that since Livermore was a federal government laboratory, its name was a federal issue. It may not have helped that one of the regents was her brother-in-law, John Lawrence, who sharply disagreed with her position. She then took her battle to Con
gress, asking for the assistance of California’s US senator, Alan Cranston. She never got it, and Ernest’s name remains on Livermore to this day.

  But whether he would truly have objected to its later role in nuclear weapons development is by no means certain. The possibility that developing the Super would unleash a permanent arms race between the United States and the Soviet Union was well understood in 1952; indeed, it was part of the standard brief against the Super offered by Oppenheimer, Fermi, Rabi, and other opponents. Livermore campaigned energetically for an ever-larger role in weapons development during Lawrence’s life and continued to do so under Edward Teller, his designated successor as director. Lawrence himself was the promoter of weapons schemes as elaborate for their time as anything Livermore developed later.

  Molly Lawrence’s purpose was to safeguard a legacy that her husband had developed over the course of a half century. Her goal was just. To repeat Robert Oppenheimer’s observation: through his genius, Ernest Lawrence had not merely illuminated some of the darkest mysteries held by nature but also invented a new approach to “the problem of studying nature.” Although Lawrence’s approach facilitated to a new degree the alliance between science and the military, it also enriched science, and indeed enriched our understanding of the natural world. Until nearly the end of his life, Ernest was able to keep the excesses that big money would bring to science in check. Even he would succumb, in time, to the conviction created by human nature that one’s own aim is invariably true. But that should not obscure his real achievement in bringing a new level of knowledge to science.

  The year before Molly started campaigning to cleanse Ernest’s name of its association with militarism and mass destruction, she evoked more uplifting memories in a talk at Berkeley. The occasion was the fiftieth anniversary of the Rad Lab’s founding. Citing John Greenleaf Whittier’s lines “Of all sad words of tongue or pen, the saddest are these: It might have been,” she pondered the unique combination of fortune, drive, and serendipity that had enabled Ernest to make his mark in the world of science—“a whole series of ‘what if’s.’ ”