Ernest Orlando Lawrence (8 August 1901-27 August 1958) was an American nuclear physicist and winner of the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1939 for his invention of the cyclotron.
Biography[]
Ernest Orlando Lawrence was born in Canton, South Dakota in 1901, and he graduated from universities in South Dakota and Minnesota before obtaining his PhD in physics at Yale in 1925. Lawrence became a professor at University of California, Berkeley in 1928, and he invented the cyclotron in 1939 and oversaw the school's radiation laboratory. Lawrence befriended J. Robert Oppenheimer, though he repeatedly cautioned Oppenheimer to keep his communist politics away from the classroom; while Oppenheimer said that he was merely advocating for racial integration, Lawrence said that he wished to vote for it rather than agitate for it on campus. During World War II, Lawrence developed electromagnetic isotope separation at the Radiation Laboratory, and he contributed to the Manhattan Project at both Oak Ridge and Los Alamos. After the war, he campaigned for government sponsorship of large scientific programs, strongly backing Edward Teller's campaign for a second nuclear weapons laboratory in Livermore, California. Lawrence died of ulcerative colitis in 1959.