Progress Report for 1947

The year 1947 has witnessed the dawn of a new era of atomic science, a flowering of fundamental knowledge of the nature of matter which appears to be unsurpassed even by that period of the 1930's which led to the age of plutonium. A great new cyclotron, an atom-smasher ten times more powerful than the one which brought plutonium into the world, has carried mankind over a new horizon of sub-atomic space. It has brought scientists at last to grips with the infinitely small and rapid forces, until now beyond reach, which operate within the incredibly tiny distances of nuclear space. On the new energy frontier created by the giant machine, now laws govern nuclear reactions. methods are at hand, heretofore unavailable, which permit the measurement and determination of the nature of sub-atomic forces. Under ultra-high energy bombardment, the nucleus presents a different appearance from the nucleus of Bohr and Rutherford, the nucleus of atomic energy fission. The new exploration of the atom has been sponsored by the Atomic Energy Commission with the giant, new 4000-ton cyclotron in the Radiation Laboratory of the University of California. This is the thirdmajor machine built by the Director of the Laboratory and inventor of the cyclotron, Professor Ernest O. Lawrence. Whether the new knowledge will be of immediate practical consequence cannot now be predicted. Nor could Professor Lawrence predict, when in 1934 he established a new atomic energy range for that day with his first cyclotron, that the fundamental knowledge he pursued would be climaxed with the discovery of plutonium. What can be predicted is this: without the new basic knowledge, practical atomic developments of the future would be limited to the applicability of the fundamental information which made possible the initial release of atomic energy. In short, the nation's atomic potential has been greatly expanded