Thinking Small in Big Science: The Founding of Fermilab, 1960–1972

Abstract

Thinking Small in Big Science: The Founding ofFermilab, 1960-1972 CATHERINE WESTFALL AND LILLIAN HODDESON “Money and effort that would go into an overly con­ servative design might better be used elsewhere . . . A major component that works reliably right off the bat is, in one sense, a failure—it is overdesigned” (Robert Wilson) What happens when science grows larger, increasingly complex, and more expensive?1 This intriguing question has prompted nu­ merous inquiries. Not surprisingly, much of this literature has fo­ cused on the increase in scale, and in particular on the innovations resulting from expansion. Recent scholarship has addressed, among other questions, the issue of how increased federal funding has led to radically new regulatory procedures, values, and definitions for scientific subfields, and how the growing size ofinstrumentation and Dr. Westfall is an assistant professor in the Lyman Briggs School at Michigan State University. Dr. Hoddeson is associate professor of history at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. The authors thank all those who generously provided documents and other information. They are particularly grateful to John Staudenmaier and Robert Smith for insightful comments and suggestions. ’This article is based on work supported by the National Science Foundation un­ der grant no. Dir-90 15473. The federal government has certain rights in this mate­ rial. Any opinions, findings, and conclusions or recommendations expressed here are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the views of the National Science Foundation. All interviews and documents cited herein are located in the Fermi National Accel­ erator Laboratory History Collection, Batavia, Illinois, unless otherwise noted. The following abbreviations are used: DOE Archives (United States Department of En­ ergy Archives, Germantown, Maryland); Green Papers (files of G. Kenneth Green, Brookhaven National Laboratory, Upton, New York); LBNL (Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, Berkeley, California), Lofgren Papers (files of EdwardJ. Lofgren , LBNL); Malamud Papers (files ofErnest Malamud, Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory, Batavia, Illinois); McMillan Papers (files of Edwin McMillan, Lawrence Berkeley National LaboratoryArchives); Mills Papers (files ofFrederick Mills, Fermi­ lab, Batavia, Illinois); Seaborg Papers (files of Glenn T. Seaborg, LBNL).© 1996 by the Society for the History of Technology. All rights reserved. 0040-165X/96/3703-0004I01.00 457 458 Catherine Westfall and Lillian Hoddeson teams has altered various types of scientific practice.2 The story of the Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory (Fermilab) cuts against the grain of this historiographical trend. Recognition in the 1960s that the number of high-energy physics facilities would likely fall by about one-half, due to the enlarged scope of Fermilab and a dimin­ ishing federal budget, led to new management and siting proce­ dures. Those building this one-of-a-kind accelerator at unprece­ dented expense were preoccupied with making innovations that would reduce costs, an impulse that often led them to emulate oldfashioned models. In short, the oft told story of expansion driven by innovation eclipses a more complicated reality: sometimes the development of big science is driven by contraction and shaped by a reversion to custom. Fermilab was born in the late 1960s, when President Lyndon B. Johnson was lecturing his White House staffabout reducing electric­ ity bills as the U.S. economy strained under the burden of the Viet­ nam War. Like other large federally sponsored projects, Fermilab was molded by the financial constraints of the time. The disparity between a stringent funding environment and the cost of the facility forced builders to find ways to reduce the size and expense of indi­ vidual components. In the process, the standard of reliability born of abundant funding in the 1950s gave way to a style that celebrated taking risks for the sake of economy and stressed the small, the mod­ est, the underdesigned. This ideology reflected the background of Robert R. Wilson, Fermilab ’s first director. Wilson had worked at the Radiation Laboratory in Berkeley during the 1930s and at Los Alamos during World War II. At Cornell in the 1950s, he developed his own cost-effective means ofbuilding accelerators, combining elements ofthe research and ma­ chine-building style ofBerkeley’s Ernest Lawrence with the methods developed under J. Robert Oppenheimer for the wartime atomic bomb project. To motivate workers to buy into his comparatively oldfashioned...