From the pocket accelerator to major scientific facilities

Abstract

The concept of “major scientific facility” was put forward by Ernest Lawrence, who invented the first cyclotron in 1929. Before Lawrence, all scientific research in the entire world can be said as “small science”, which is characterized by the research carried out by individuals or in small size of groups. Since the 1930s, due to the high financial need to build larger accelerators, Lawrence realized that a major scientific research project needs to be completed by a team with people of different expertise. His concept of teamwork has become a tradition in their laboratory at Berkeley and continues to this day. Major scientific facilities can provide ultimate research methods for exploring unknowns, which may likely lead to scientific breakthroughs. Since then, a new trend has gradually emerged in the development of science and technology, that is, every major breakthrough obtained in research, and even a significant step forward, is largely inseparable from installations of large facilities. This is precisely the impetus for countries all over the world to build major scientific facilities with huge investment. The development status of large scientific facilities determines a country’s ability to make such breakthroughs in cutting-edge research, and thus determines the country’s scientific and technological competitiveness in the world. Through the implementation of the Manhattan Project during the Second World War, the United States was directly benefited from the fact that the remaining facilities at that time all became national laboratories after the war. Following Lawrence’s original concept about the teamwork with major scientific facilities, the present article briefly reviews the history and current status of several national laboratories in the United States, and points out that the national-laboratory model can indeed form a strong scientific development impetus and play an international leading role in scientific and technological fields. I take four US national laboratories as examples: The Lawrence-Berkeley National Laboratory, the Argonne National Laboratory, the Oak Ridge National Laboratory, and the Los Alamos National Laboratory, to show that the model, centered on large-scale facilities with the management guaranteed by effective national plans and capital investment, is worthy of in-depth study for reference. In recent years, China has strongly emphasized the importance in the development of scientific research bases and has built a number of key laboratories. It is pointed out that comparing with the standard of the world-leading laboratories, China still needs to narrow the gap in management and in operation.