Exit Atom-smasher

ASEE Prism, Apr 2008 by Grose, Thomas

NUCLEAR PHYSICS

IT'S MASSIVE and massively historic. Built in the mid-193Os at Columbia University, the hulking,30-ton cyclotron split atomic nuclei using an enormous electromagnet to hurl and smash particles at the breakneck speed of 25,000 miles per hour. The information gleaned from these experiments helped the U.S. build the first atom bomb.

The cyclotron has long been eclipsed: Next month, when the world's most powerful particle accelerator is activated outside Geneva at CERN, the European Organization for Nuclear Research, particles will fly around the track of the Large Hadron Collider at nearly the speed of light-approximately 670 million m.p.h. But Columbia is again supporting a new threshold of nuclear research in joining an international consortium of 1,800 physicists involved with CERN.The school has also purchased a high-speed online connection to this premier atom-smasher, gaining access to CERN data at the rate of one gigabit per second. Though some Columbia faculty petitioned for the original cyclotron to be preserved for historical value, refurbishing it proved to be too costly. So America's smashing cultural icon is headed for the scrap yard.-TG

THOMAS K. GROSE is one of Prism's most frequent contributors. This month, he wrote "Beyond the Blueprint," about the joint effort by Boeing, Dassault Systèmes and Georgia Tech to educate softwaresavvy engineers, as well as "Not Now, Voyager," describing the falling dollar's impact on higher education. Tom's work also appears regularly in our Briefings section. He has written for US News and World Report and the European edition of Time. A native of Detroit who spent many years in Washington, D.C., Tom now lives 90 miles outside of London, where he watches in amazement as sons Christian and Dominic become British schoolboys.