In the late 1920s the physicist who would become the lab’s namesake, Ernest Lawrence, conceived of an accelerator that shot particles not in straight lines, as linear accelerators did, but in circles. Strategically placed magnets would deflect the particles just enough to prod them to follow the closed curve, around and around, faster and faster, to higher and higher levels of energy. Lawrence’s first “proton merry-go-round”—or cyclotron—was five inches in diameter, small enough to fit inside any room bigger than a broom closet in the physics building on campus. In 1931 he’d moved his
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