America was founded on the example of high-caliber immigrants forming a social melting pot during the Colonial Period, the time when the Constitution was crafted. Nobel prize winning physicist Ernest Orlando Lawrence from Canton, South Dakota, could have served as a poster child of how the system was supposed to work.
His grandfather Lavrenson came to South Dakota from Norway, but changed his last name to Lawrence in order to melt better. Education and industriousness were inbred into the family. The father became a superintendent of schools and then the president of Northern State. He instilled in his son the intrinsic value of a life of public service rather than a desire for personal profiteering.
After graduating from the University of South Dakota, Lawrence obtained a Master’s at the University of Minnesota, then a Ph.D. at Yale. He chose the more difficult discipline of physics during its golden age of foundational advancement. Even as a student he pursued breakthrough, cutting edge research, eventually ending up at the University of California in Berkeley, then known as a hotbed of intellectualism and excellence, long before it was taken over by leftist radicals.
At Berkeley, Lawrence became part of a de facto team of international physicists working on atomic theory. His contribution was to develop the cyclotron, defined by the online dictionary as “an apparatus in which charged atomic and subatomic particles are accelerated by an alternating electric field while following an outward spiral or circular path in a magnetic field.”
He got some of his ideas the way prominent scientists like Michael Faraday had always done, by making concept models with materials around his home. He got ideas about particle acceleration by watching children swinging on the playground. He spent lots of time in the university library picking up ideas from other experts, like Norwegian physicist Rolf Widerøe (above), just by studying a schematic diagram in a journal.
But WWII meant that physics and the atomic bomb would determine which side would be victorious. Lawrence knew that money and teamwork had to be ramped up significantly: “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.”
After all, Einstein and others has met with FDR the day before the attack on Pearl Harbor to secure support for an all-out atom bomb effort. No sense in letting Germany or Japan get there first.
Physicist Luis W. Alvarez gave the former South Dakotan perhaps his highest compliment when he observed that “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 an immigrant family himself, Luis Alvarez later witnessed how the leftist version of egalitarianism was actually hurting scientific research: “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.”