Session T5: Pais Prize Session: The National Laboratories after 1980

Abraham Pais Prize for History of Physics Lecture: Big, Bigger, Too Big? From Los Alamos to Fermilab and the SSC

The modern era of big science emerged during World War II. Oppenheimer's Los Alamos laboratory offered the quintessential model of a government-funded, mission-oriented facility directed by a strong charismatic leader. The postwar beneficiaries of this model included the increasingly ambitious large laboratories that participated in particle physics--in particular, Brookhaven, SLAC, and Fermilab. They carried the big science they practiced into a new realm where experiments eventually became as large and costly as entire laboratories had been. Meanwhile the available funding grew more limited causing the physics research to be concentrated into fewer and bigger experiments that appeared never to end. The next phase in American high-energy physics was the Superconducting Super Collider, the most costly pure physics project ever attempted. The SSC's termination was a tragedy for American science, but for historians it offers an opportunity to understand what made the success of earlier large high-energy physics laboratories possible, and what made the continuation of the SSC impossible. The most obvious reason for the SSC's failure was its enormous and escalating budget, which Congress would no longer support. Other factors need to be recognized however: no leader could be found with directing skills as strong as those of Wilson, Panofsky, Lederman, or Richter; the scale of the project subjected it to uncomfortable public and Congressional scrutiny; and the DOE's enforcement of management procedures of the military-industrial complex that clashed with those typical of the scientific community led to the alienation and withdrawal of many of the most creative scientists, and to the perception and the reality of poor management. These factors, exacerbated by negative pressure from scientists in other fields and a post-Cold War climate in which physicists had little of their earlier cultural prestige, discouraged efforts to gain international support. They made the SSC crucially different from its predecessors and sealed its doom.   

DOE and its Labs -- Evolution of the Relationship from the 1970s to Now

The Department of Energy is a mash-up that occurred in two steps during the 1970s, transforming the post World War II Atomic Energy Commission with its system of laboratories into the Cabinet level department that exists today. The driver was the energy crises of the 1970s and the result created a system that brought together most of the federal governments energy programs under the single DOE roof. With the expansion of the mission came administrative complexity and the evolution of what has been described as a partnership between the Department and it labs into the vendor -- purchaser relation that is becoming the model of today. I will review what I think were the drivers of the change and comment on how things might be improved in the future.   

A Good Name and Great Riches: Rebranding Solid State Physics for the National Laboratories

In 1943 Oliver Buckley, lamenting the inadequacy of term ``physics'' to evoke what physicists did, quoted the proverb, ``A good name is rather to be chosen than great riches.'' Some forty years later, solid state physicists confronted similar discontent with their name, precipitating the rise of the appellation ``condensed matter physics.'' Ostensibly a rebranding of a well-established field, the change signaled deeper conceptual and institutional realignment. Whereas ``solid state'' emerged in the 1940s in the service of institutional aims, ``condensed matter'' more accurately captured a distinct set of theoretical and experimental approaches. Reimagining the field around core conceptual approaches set condensed matter apart from the inchoate field of materials science, which subsumed a growing proportion of solid state funding and personnel through the 1980s. Federally funded research installations were the source of ``great riches'' for scientific research. The DOE National Laboratory System and the DARPA network of Interdisciplinary Laboratories, given their responsiveness to shifts in national funding priorities, provide a sensitive historical instrument through which to trace the transition from solid state to condensed matter. The reorganization of solid state in response to the evolution of national priorities and funding practices precipitated a sharpening of the field's intellectual mission. At the same time, it reflected the difficulties solid state faced articulating its intellectual--as opposed to technological--merit. The proverb continues, ``{\ldots} and loving favor rather than silver and gold.'' The adoption of a name that emphasized intellectual cohesion and associated social esteem exposed the growing tension between technology-oriented national funding goals for materials research and condensed matter physics' ascendant intellectual identity.