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Columbia Holds Wake For Historic Cyclotron
Pickens writes "They called it leviathan, behemoth, Big Bertha. At 12 feet wide, rising 7 feet above the cement floor and weighing an estimated 65 tons, the Columbia cyclotron, the particle accelerator built in the late 1930s by Columbia physicist John Dunning, played a crucial role in the dawn of the nuclear era. Dunning's experiments verified fission, established many of its properties, and, most significantly, demonstrated that the rare isotope Uranium 235, and not the more common U-238, was the more fissionable form of the element. 'In a week or two, they will dismantle it, and they will sell it for scrap,' says George Hamawy, Columbia University's director of radiation safety. 'This is the last chance to see it,' Hamawy added as students held a wake and contractors arrived to remove the cyclotron. 'We're going to make two-thousand-pound sections,' said one contractor before taking the cyclotron's measurements. 'We'll start slicing on Monday.'"
No matter how large, complex, or beautiful anything we make is, it is all essentially disposable. We inevitably attach sentiment to things like cars or houses or boats or gigantic cyclotrons but they are just...things.
Look, the Navy has all this romantic imagery associated with plying the seas in deadly warships (read "Choosers of the Slain" by Kipling) but almost all ships end up as razor blades or sunk for target practice. Likewise a lot of us have fun tinkering with computers...but over the past 5 years haven't we all broken down and rebuilt assorted Frankenboxes for this project or that project a hundred times over?
It's the adventure of DOING stuff with the things that is important, not the things themselves. As impressive as the cyclotron is, it's the science and discovery that are really meaningful.