Big Science

by Michael Hiltzik

  The formal presentation of the Nobel Prize was held on February 29, 1940, in Berkeley. Kamen and Ruben were bringing their work to a close while the frenzied planning for the ceremony proceeded around them. In the second week of February they staged a marathon seventy-two-hour bombardment by the Crocker Cracker. Kamen was alone in the lab when the run ended late on the third night. Thunder and heavy rain filled the air, punctuated by inhuman shrieks emanating from a recording of a grisly French melodrama being played for a French class on a nearby balcony. Before dawn, he withdrew the last probe from the vacuum tank, scraped the flecks of Aquadag into a bottle, and deposited it at the Rat House for Ruben. On his way home, disheveled and hunched over in the pouring rain, Kamen was picked up by a Berkeley police cruiser and slotted into a lineup for the surviving witness of a multiple murder committed that night. He passed the test and was released to go home, where he collapsed into bed and slept for twelve hours. After awakening, he watched Ruben complete the assay—from a distance, for he was radioactive. Their counter clicked; there were emissions just above the background level of radioactivity, but that was enough. It was February 27, and the search was over. They had carbon-14, and by their calculations, its half-life was at least 1,000 years. (In fact, it is about 5,730 years.) The material they had isolated would be the most important biological isotope of all, and the key to a wide range of research requiring precise biological tracing and dating.

  Quivering with the uncertainty of pioneers, dreading that they might have been led astray by some minuscule miscalculation, they wrote a short note for publication and hastened to Lawrence’s house for his approval. They found him in bed with one of his chronic sinus infections, resting up for the Nobel ceremony two days hence. Overjoyed at having bested the disdainful Urey, “he jumped out of bed, heedless of his cold, danced around the room, and gleefully congratulated us,” Kamen recalled. What they did not anticipate, however, was Lawrence’s reaction to the publication the following March of their note in the Physical Review. Ruben’s name was listed first, before Kamen’s.

  The explanation was simple; the consequences for Kamen’s career rather more complex. Ruben had requested the lead position. This struck Kamen as presumptuous, for he was the senior member of the team and the one whose work had been the more important. But Ruben pleaded that his quest for tenure in the Chemistry Department rested on a knife edge, not least because of the acrid hint of anti-Semitism in the Berkeley administration. Lead authorship of a landmark paper could tip the balance in his favor. Kamen, with a surfeit of empathy and a lack of foresight, assented. But when Lawrence saw the publication and heard the lame explanation, he turned his back on Kamen and strode away in wordless fury at the Rad Lab’s subordinate position. The discovery of carbon-14 was the high water mark of Kamen’s career in the Rad Lab; its publication was the beginning of his painful journey out of Lawrence’s good graces. Even worse, his act of solicitude for a good friend resulted in his forever being known as the junior partner in a momentous discovery.

  But that came later. At the Nobel award ceremony in Berkeley, Kamen was still basking in the glory of having demonstrated, once again, the spectacular capabilities of the cyclotron. Birge delivered the news to the audience in Wheeler Hall, accurately describing carbon-14 as “certainly much the most important radioactive substance that has yet been created.” At his suggestion, the entire audience turned to Kamen and applauded.

  But the day belonged to Ernest Lawrence. He took full advantage of the occasion, reminding his listeners that the cyclotron was the source of discoveries of “immediate practical significance” and pointing to the next goalpost: “The domain of energies above a hundred million volts . . . a territory with treasures transcending anything thus far unearthed.

  “To penetrate this new frontier,” he said, “will require the building of a giant cyclotron, perhaps weighing more than four thousand tons”—twenty times larger than the Crocker. “Of course, such a great instrument would involve large expenditures,” Lawrence said. “Perhaps I might say that the difficulties in the way of crossing the next frontier in the atom are no longer in our laboratory. They constitute a very considerable financial problem, which we have handed over to President Sproul!”

  If Sproul was startled at those words, he kept his reaction under wraps. But he could not be unaware that Lawrence’s program would once again strain the university’s resources beyond the breaking point. More sources of funding plainly would be needed. Fortunately, the new laureate would find them waiting in the wings, starting with an individual who would do more to shape the course of scientific research, with less public renown, than almost any other figure in the late twentieth century.

  Chapter Ten

  * * *

  Mr. Loomis

  All during the 1930s the legend had grown, percolating through the physics fraternity by word of mouth: tales of a fabulous hilltop laboratory, exquisitely equipped, owned by a mysterious millionaire who moved through the highest circles of business and politics as quietly as a shadow. The lab was located in a secluded community of country mansions an hour or two north of New York City, and not just anyone could gain admission. It was not enough to know somebody. If you were an unremarkable talent, it was almost impossible to obtain an invitation; but if you were an accomplished scientist or one of manifest promise, somehow the invitation would come to you.

  The millionaire’s name was Alfred Lee Loomis, and his domain was known as Tower House. The sprawling Tudor monstrosity in the plutocrats’ retreat of Tuxedo Park, New York, had been built at the turn of the century by a wealthy banker and abandoned amid the grief of a family tragedy. Alfred Loomis spent part of the fortune he had made on Wall Street to buy the derelict house in 1926, and then fitted it out with the latest in scientific equipment and embarked there on a new career, his third. He had already made his mark as a successful lawyer and as an investment banker. Now he became a physicist. Measured by his influence on the lives of his fellow Americans, that would be his most important role, though his least known.

  The “peculiar accomplishment” of Alfred Loomis, it would later be written, was “being a public figure without letting the public in on it.” Within a select circle, however, he was an eminent and respected figure. The visitors’ roster at Tower House listed Albert Einstein and Werner Heisenberg. Niels Bohr, during a crucial visit to the United States just before the onset of war, stopped there to see Loomis before continuing to Washington; it was said that he was dining at Tower House when he received a telegram from Europe relaying the earthshaking news of the fissioning of uranium.

  Ernest Lawrence first came to Tower House in 1936. The deep friendship between him and Loomis that began during that visit would change both men’s lives.

  Loomis was a throwback. Luis Alvarez, who was privileged to serve as a protégé of both Loomis and Lawrence, called him “the last of the great amateurs of science.” Alvarez was using the word amateur in its traditional sense: someone who engaged in a pursuit not for money or fame but purely for the love of knowledge and the abstract quest for truth. This was a nineteenth-century paradigm of science, the milieu of Charles Darwin, Lord Henry Cavendish (the gentleman scholar in whose honor Cambridge’s physics lab would be endowed and named), and the distinguished Egyptologist Lord Carnarvon. Come the turn of the century, professionalism transformed careers in the laboratory and the university classroom into middle-class pursuits, which is why Loomis’s conversion of Tower House into a private scientific preserve hinted at a kind of antique eccentricity. Yet that was the wrong impression to take from Alfred Loomis’s devotion to science. His outlook was very modern indeed.

  Loomis was born on November 4, 1887, to a family of eminent Yankee physicians. They were not wholly of the American aristocracy but tolerably close, with connections and affluence that endowed Alfred with upper-class tastes and bearing. His mother was a Stimson, a grand old family in banking and law. One of Alfred’s cousins and contemporaries, Henry Stimson, would dis
tinguish himself in public service with one stint as secretary of state and two as secretary of war.

  Alfred followed a conventional educational path for his class: prep school at Phillips Academy in Andover followed by Yale. As a youth, he displayed prodigious talents for magic and for chess, at which he could play two blindfold games simultaneously. Yet in later life, his attitude toward these skills reflected a curious facet of his personality: having mastered them, he abandoned them almost entirely to move on to new challenges. Luis Alvarez would observe that in his thirty-five-year association with Loomis, he never saw him perform a magic trick for an adult audience (though occasionally for children) or even mention the game of chess, noting, “his homes contained not a single visible board or set.” It was as though each stage of his life required perfect concentration, undistracted by old pastimes. The pattern would recur over and over, but there was an important exception. Throughout his life, Loomis remained fascinated with technology—“gadgeteering,” as he described it. In his youth, there were model planes and radio-controlled automobiles; and in maturity, he would play a key role in the development of artillery technologies, radar, and ultimately the most important “gadget” of all: the atomic bomb.

  After Yale and Harvard Law School, Loomis took a job at his Stimson cousins’ Wall Street law firm. Winthrop & Stimson was a familial partnership that prided itself on its integrity and the rectitude of its clientele. The firm shunned those who came seeking a defense of indefensible behavior, which was common enough in the unprincipled corridors of the financial district. If that meant that Stimson partners earned rather less money than lawyers at other firms, so be it; they made enough, and kept their scruples besides.

  That stage of Loomis’s life ended with World War I. At the age of twenty-nine, he enlisted in the officer’s corps, where his mathematical skills, honed at Yale, were promptly put to the test. At Aberdeen Proving Grounds in Maryland, he helped invent a new device for measuring the velocity of a cannon-fired shell, essential for accurate range finding, winning a patent for the work. Loomis obtained other patents, including one for a mechanical horse-race toy, but he was proudest of the Aberdeen Chronograph, which became standard field equipment for the army and the navy. It was the only invention he cited in his entry in Who’s Who.

  After his sojourn among the scientists and engineers of Aberdeen, Loomis returned home to find the practice of law at the Stimson firm unutterably dull. An escape hatch was provided by his brother-in-law Landon Thorne, a Wall Street wunderkind who proposed that they form an investment banking partnership. They made a perfectly complementary pair, Thorne a skillful salesman who hawked the securities transactions contrived by the introverted Alfred. “Loomis had ninety ideas a minute,” one of their financial backers observed. “Thorne knew how to pick the good ones and put them to work.”

  The partners rode the growth of the electric utility industry to wealth and influence in the postwar economic boom. By the 1930s, however, utility holding companies came to symbolize the corporate corruption and greed that the average American saw as the root cause of the Great Depression. Loomis’s experience as a utility financier would come to color his opinion of Franklin Roosevelt, who was determined to break up the very firms that Loomis had organized—among them the Commonwealth & Southern Corporation, which faced a new rivalry from the Tennessee Valley Authority, one of the earliest New Deal initiatives. “He thought [TVA] would destroy the business world,” recalled Loomis’s daughter-in-law Paulie.

  By the time of FDR’s accession, Loomis already had achieved his goal of becoming a millionaire—$50 million was the figure later cited by Henry Luce’s Fortune magazine—and managed as well to protect his wealth from the crash of 1929. Like other financiers, he was deeply demoralized by the post-crash hostility in Washington and the nation toward Wall Street and the banks, so in the first years of the New Deal, Loomis resigned from most of his board seats and sold almost all his corporate stock. “Without so much as a backward look,” his biographer observed, “Loomis quit Wall Street for good.”

  The foundation for the next dramatic change of his life’s course had been laid years before. The catalyst was his friendship with Robert W. Wood, a Johns Hopkins physicist whom Loomis had met at Aberdeen. After World War I, when Wood volunteered to tutor Loomis in physics, Loomis responded with an uncommon offer: “He suggested that if I contemplated any research we might do together which required more money than the budget of the Physics Department [at Johns Hopkins] could supply, he would like to underwrite it.”

  That was in 1924. Wood took up Loomis’s proposal to work in the developing field of ultrasonics, which involved sound waves with frequencies inaudible to humans. Ultrasonics had promising potential for physics, chemistry, and biology, ranging from the detection of underwater objects to the removal of diseased tissue, but the research required hugely expensive equipment. Without hesitation, Loomis escorted Wood to General Electric’s research headquarters in Schenectady, New York, where they ordered an immense high-powered generator to be shipped to Loomis’s residence in Tuxedo Park and installed in the garage.

  Within two years, the burgeoning lab had outgrown its drafty quarters. So Loomis purchased the decrepit Tower House, its stained-glass windows long since shattered by vandals, its vast salons draped with spider webs and infested by field mice (also, according to local legend, by ghosts), and proceeded to turn it into a scientific palace.

  As other wealthy men collected art, Alfred Loomis collected scientists. “Queer things” went on at the old house on the hill, the locals later told Fortune. “Strange outlanders with flowing hair and baggy trousers were settling down there for weeks and months on end. They were performing all kinds of crazy experiments—cooking eggs and killing frogs with sounds that nobody could hear, making turtles’ hearts beat in a dish, etc., etc.”

  Yet the lab was no dilettante’s plaything. In 1926 and 1928, Loomis and Wood sailed to Europe to tour its great laboratories. They met with Ernest Rutherford himself—“very abrupt in conversation,” Loomis would recall. In the midst of their exchange, the great man suddenly burst out: “You damned American millionaires! Why can’t you give me a million volts, and I will split the atom.” The nonplussed Loomis replied, “Well, we don’t know how to make a million volts that can be useful to you. We can only make sparks jump.”

  Tuxedo Park became an obligatory stopover for eminent scientists visiting the United States. The place teemed with first-class scientists (and during the summer months, with their families). Loomis’s guests arrived by private railcar and were housed in luxury, but they came to do serious work. In the decade after 1927, sixty-six papers were published in scientific journals based on research carried out at Tower House. Regular convocations there attracted participants from the highest echelons of international research; a conference in January 1928 honoring the German Nobel laureate James Franck featured presentations by Franck (his first lecture in the United States), Robert Wood, Karl Compton of Princeton, and W. F. G. Swann, delivered to an audience bathed in the light of the restored stained-glass window of the Tower House library. All through the Depression, the Physical Review’s customary publication invoice to researchers for their submitted articles came with a note stating that if they or their university could not pay the bill, it would be covered by an “anonymous friend” of the American Physical Society. The anonymous friend was Alfred Loomis.

  • • •

  The circumstances of Ernest Lawrence’s first visit to Tuxedo Park are murky. Loomis recalled merely that Ernest came out for a long weekend during 1936 and that an invitation to the world-famous inventor of the cyclotron would have been unremarkable. “Every famous scientist had been out there as a routine thing,” he recalled.

  What he did remember is that he and Lawrence immediately “hit it off.” Their personalities and backgrounds were as divergent as Ernest’s and Robert Oppenheimer’s, but like that other relationship, theirs thrived on their complementarity: the country l
ad from a state university and the Yankee scion from Andover and Yale; the extroverted fund-raiser and the backstage financier; the professionally accomplished scientific genius and the eager amateur. But there also was that indefinable something that arises between two men destined to be lifelong friends. Separations lasting months seemed to be no more than “gaps in time that weren’t any bigger than if I should go upstairs, change my suit, and come down. We would go right on where we left off,” Loomis recalled. Their friendship “had all the earmarks of a ‘perfect marriage,’ ” Luis Alvarez asserted: Ernest’s “ebullient nature plus his scientific insight and his charisma . . . attracted Alfred to him, and Alfred in turn introduced Ernest to a world he had never known before, and found equally fascinating.”

  When Lawrence visited New York, which happened with increasing regularity as his fund-raising demands expanded, he invariably stayed at Loomis’s Manhattan town house. At dinner parties there and at Tuxedo Park, Alfred and his extroverted mistress, Manette (who would become his second wife in 1945), would introduce him to their society friends, who later would discover to their astonishment that the big-boned, easygoing fellow with the sparkling blue eyes who had entertained them all night with vitality and ease was the brilliant master of an impenetrable science. None could equate this engaging young man with the stereotypical aged, graybearded laboratory scientist of their fancies. “He was just a handsome, big fellow,” Manette would recall, “full of loving and full of fun, and very easy to make friends with.”