Ernest Lawrence

Who was Ernest Lawrence?

Ernest Orlando Lawrence (August 8, 1901 – August 27, 1958) was an American physicist who received the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1939 for his invention of the cyclotron. A graduate of the University of South Dakota and University of Minnesota, Lawrence obtained a PhD in physics at Yale in 1925. In 1928, he was hired as an associate professor of physics at the University of California, Berkeley, becoming the youngest full professor there two years later. His Radiation Laboratory became an official department of the University of California in 1936, with Lawrence as its director. In its library one evening, Lawrence was intrigued by a diagram of an accelerator that produced high-energy particles. He contemplated how it could be made compact, and came up with an idea for a circular accelerating chamber between the poles of an electromagnet.

Lawrence went on to build a series of ever larger and more expensive cyclotrons.

Historical significance

He is known for his work on uranium-isotope separation for the Manhattan Project, as well as for founding the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory and the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory. The result was the first cyclotron.