PHYS 199M Lecture Notes - Lecture 10: Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, Ernest Lawrence, Induced Radioactivity
18 Nov 2016
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Came to berkeley as a faculty member. Founder of lawrence berkeley and lawrence livermore national labs. Worked together to establish berkeley as the center of physics in the us: birth of big science. Lawrence"s principal contribution was not so much to science itself, but rather in the tools to do science. First practical high energy particle accelerator that allowed new studies of the nucleus. Expensive and required large teams of people. Irene and frederic joliot-curie: identified the positron and neutron, but did not recognize the results, nobel prize for discovery of artificial radioactivity using alpha particle bombardment of various elements, including beryllium, discovery of the neutron. Fired alpha particles at a beryllium target. Found gamma rays that were one directional and could knock high energy protons out of materials. Rays (photons) do not have mass, but they have momentum. If these particles were rays and had no mass, they were recoil.
