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Ernest Orlando Lawrence
(8 Aug 1901 - 27 Aug 1958)
American physicist who invented the cyclotron, the first device for the production of high energy particles. He was awarded the 1939 Nobel Prize for Physics for this work.
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Science Quotes by Ernest Orlando Lawrence (2 quotes)
I am mindful that scientific achievement is rooted in the past, is cultivated to full stature by many contemporaries and flourishes only in favorable environment. No individual is alone responsible for a single stepping stone along the path of progress, and where the path is smooth progress is most rapid. In my own work this has been particularly true.
— Ernest Orlando Lawrence
Nobel Prize banquet speech (29 Feb 1940)
The day when the scientist, no matter how devoted, may make significant progress alone and without material help is past. This fact is most self-evident in our work. Instead of an attic with a few test tubes, bits of wire and odds and ends, the attack on the atomic nucleus has required the development and construction of great instruments on an engineering scale.
— Ernest Orlando Lawrence
Nobel Prize banquet speech (29 Feb 1940)
Quotes by others about Ernest Orlando Lawrence (3)
In my considered opinion the peer review system, in which proposals rather than proposers are reviewed, is the greatest disaster visited upon the scientific community in this century. No group of peers would have approved my building the 72-inch bubble chamber. Even Ernest Lawrence told me he thought I was making a big mistake. He supported me because he knew my track record was good. I believe that U.S. science could recover from the stultifying effects of decades of misguided peer reviewing if we returned to the tried-and-true method of evaluating experimenters rather than experimental proposals. Many people will say that my ideas are elitist, and I certainly agree. The alternative is the egalitarianism that we now practice and I’ve seen nearly kill basic science in the USSR and in the People's Republic of China.
Alvarez: Adventures of a Physicist (1987), 200-1.
In Melvin Calvin’s office there were four photographs: Michael Polanyi, Joel Hildebrand, Gilbert N. Lewis, and Ernest O. Lawrence. These scientists were his mentors: Polanyi for introducing him to the chemistry of phthalocyanine; Hildebrand for bringing him to Berkeley; Lewis, perhaps his most influential teacher; and Lawrence, who provided him the opportunity to work with the new scientific tool of radioactive carbon, which enabled the search for the path of carbon in photosynthesis to be successful.
Co-author with Marilyn Taylor and Robert E. Connick, obituary, 'Melvin Calvin', Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society (Dec 2000), 144, No. 4, 454.
One indicator of Ernest Lawrence’s influence is the fact that I am the eighth member of his laboratory staff to receive the highest award that can come to a scientist—the Nobel Prize.
From Nobel Banquet Speech (10 Dec 1968). Collected in Wilhelm Odelberg (ed.), Les Prix Nobel en 1968 (1969).
See also:
- 8 Aug - short biography, births, deaths and events on date of Lawrence's birth.
- Cyclotron Man - Ernest Orlando Lawrence was on the cover of Time magazine for 1 Nov 1937.
- An American Genius: The Life of Ernest Orlando Lawrence, by Childs Herbert. - book suggestion.
- Booklist for Ernest Orlando Lawrence.
In science it often happens that scientists say, 'You know that's a really good argument; my position is mistaken,' and then they would actually change their minds and you never hear that old view from them again. They really do it. It doesn't happen as often as it should, because scientists are human and change is sometimes painful. But it happens every day. I cannot recall the last time something like that happened in politics or religion.
(1987) -- 
