Dedication celebrations at scientific labs

The principal speaker at the dedication of the main accelerator at Fermilab on 11 May 1974 professed bewilderment. “Until the call which commanded me here,” physicist Leon Lederman told the audience, “I hadn’t even known that the protons we had been studying were coming from an undedicated accelerator.” He claimed to be out of his element. People who run dedication ceremonies are not scientists, he said, but “older persons, or statesmen or philosophers”.

Lederman was being disingenuous; scientists, after all, had been dedicating particle-physics accelerators for decades. They did so – and continue to do so – for very understandable reasons. A dedication, according to my dictionary, is a ceremony to mark the official completion of a public building, monument or other work, the opening of which ushers in an important change in the social order. The event is both a moment of celebration and triumph – serving to thank those who worked on it – and an occasion to impress others who may need to be recruited for future political battles.

The completion of an accelerator – when it changes from something being built to something being used – involves the entry of a new power into the world, opening up new domains for scientists to explore. What kind of structure could be more deserving of a dedication ceremony?

The first of many

In the old days, this change of state was unproblematic. You worked on an accelerator until you got a beam of particles out of it, then you paused a moment to celebrate before starting to use it. Probably the first accelerator to have a full-scale dedication party was the 184 inch synchrocyclotron at the Berkeley Radiation Laboratory in California, which was built shortly after the Second World War under the guidance of the clever and politically savvy accelerator maker and Nobel laureate Ernest O Lawrence.

The machine, which opened up the energy region in which mesons could be created, produced its first beam just before midnight on 1 November 1946. The excited scientists used a piece of film to take a “picture” of the beam, developed it, and all present signed it to mark the important and historic commissioning moment.

Lawrence then organized a weekend-long celebration at a posh beach hotel at Monterey, south of San Francisco. However, with an eye on securing future financial support for the project, he made the event chiefly a political affair. “Everyone who had contributed money or influence to the completion of the machine was invited,” Berkeley’s historians later wrote. These included representatives of the Rockefeller Foundation, the National Academy of Sciences, the International Cancer Research Foundation and people from General Electric, Kodak and other leading businesses.

Six years later, Berkeley’s rival accelerator institution – the Brookhaven National Laboratory on America’s east coast – completed its first major accelerator, the Cosmotron. The Cosmotron’s first beam arrived on 20 May 1952, and it became the first machine to boost subatomic particles to energies of more than 1 GeV – high enough to create so-called “strange particles”. The scientists who built it argued that, given its size and significance, it deserved just as much of a ceremony as a ship christening, a keel laying or indeed any device paid by taxpayers for the social good. They also believed that the event could be used to showcase the Brookhaven laboratory to influential politicians, perhaps even President Truman.

However, the Atomic Energy Commission, which funded the machine, frowned on the idea of a political event and insisted instead on a “scientific and academic” affair. When the dedication finally took place on 15 December 1952, the Cosmotron was still not running perfectly and was some two months from being user-friendly.

Martini and mayhem

Still, the enthusiasm of the participants, aided by generous consumption of frequently refilled pitchers of Martini at each table, sabotaged the commission’s intent to keep the affair “scientific and academic”. Luis Alvarez, a Berkeley physicist who was 16 years away from his Nobel prize, set his tablecloth on fire. Another party-goer shouted words of encouragement to the final speaker before passing out on the table. That speaker – the president of Johns Hopkins University, Detlev Bronk – managed to mix up the text of his speech with one that he was scheduled to give in Canada a few days later, puzzling those still compos mentis, with references to “your King”.

The next major American accelerator – Berkeley’s 6 GeV Bevatron, which opened up the energy region in which heavy particles like anti-protons would be produced – was an exception; it was not dedicated. Perhaps the reason was a string of difficulties that befell the accelerator during its start-up – including a broken generator that alone kept the machine down for two months – or perhaps it was simply the desire of the Berkeley scientists to get to work.

However, the accelerator after that – Brookhaven’s 33 GeV Alternating Gradient Synchrotron (AGS) – did have a dedication. The AGS was built not inside a building, but in a tunnel under an embankment that traversed the landscape. The size of these new machines had changed the nature of accelerators. “One no longer builds accelerators as such,” wrote Ken Green, one of its chief architects, “but as a component of a complete high-energy facility.” Not only that, he added, its systems were now so complex that “an accelerator is never finished, but constantly in the process of being upgraded”.

The AGS signalled a change not only in experimental science but also in dedications. Its dedication, on 13 September 1961, had no particular link to the completion of the machine nor to the start of experimental work, which had already been going on for some months. The dedication was instead arranged to accommodate the schedules of politicians and other notables.

Vodka and kisses

Dedications, of course, have not just been American affairs. On 24 November 1959 the CERN particle-physics laboratory in Geneva celebrated the fact that its new proton synchrotron had accelerated protons to energies of 25 GeV becoming the world’s highest-energy machine in the process. Amid emotional and dramatic scenes, writes Gordon Fraser in his book The Quark Machines (1997 Institute of Physics Publishing), the Italian physicist Gilberto Bernardini jubilantly kissed John Adams, the “laconic” leader of the project.

The next day a special meeting was held to convey the news to CERN staff. Adams showed a vodka bottle mat he had been given some months earlier on a trip to Dubna in the Soviet Union, with strict instructions that it should be drunk when the CERN machine had surpassed the Dubna machine’s record of 10 GeV. “The bottle was now empty,” writes Fraser. ‘Adams [then] produced a photograph of the oscilloscope trace displaying the achievement and squeezed it into the bottle, giving instructions that it should now be returned to Dubna.”

Back on the other side of the Atlantic, the timing of the dedication of the next big US hadron accelerator – Fermilab’s 400 GeV main ring – was still more arbitrary. Designed to study key particle resonances, the machine produced its first 200 GeV beam in March 1972, but magnet troubles rendered the machine unusable for more man a year after that. Moreover, because Fermilab was new and the initial construction had focused on the underground accelerator, there was no good place to hold the dedication.

The lab’s planners therefore waited until the photogenic “high-rise” office building on the site was completed before consulting the calendars of key politicians and scheduling the event for May 1974. The ceremony drew a senator, a congressman and the chairwoman of the AEC. US President Richard Nixon, who was then in the final phase of the Watergate crisis, was a no-show, although he did send a signed plaque.

“How does one dedicate?” asked Lederman at the ceremony. He found a worthy way, playing a recording of the late Enrico Fermi – although the wind whipping across the Illinois plain put some of the audio equipment out of commission and Fermi’s voice failed to carry far.

Balloons for Bill

The newest US accelerator – Brookhaven’s Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider (RHIC) – is larger and more complicated still than any of its predecessors. It was built to study quark matter, and a large conference on the subject will be held next January to discuss the first results of the huge new energy regime that it will make accessible. However, even RHIC’s commissioning was convoluted.

RHIC has two counter-revolving rings of particles – named “blue” and “yellow” – that meet at six intersection regions. Accelerator physicists normally consider such a machine to have been commissioned when they have managed to circulate particles readily in each ring for multiple laps, captured and stored the particles in the radio-frequency system and then accelerated to higher energies. For an accelerator accelerates, right?

However, a key document called a CD-4 had to be signed before the Department of Energy (DOE) would authorize routine operations. Indeed, once the RHIC budget had been officially transferred from construction to operations, both the lab and the DOE were keen to surmount this important legal milestone. The blue ring was commissioned in July 1999, and particles had made some trips round the yellow ring in August.

However, as summer gave way to autumn, the accelerator builders still had much to do and were persuaded to narrow their definition of “commission” so that the all-important document could be signed and authorization made. Once the machine was thus “officially” commissioned, an official dedication party was scheduled around the calendar of Bill Richardson, DOE secretary, for 4 October 1999.

It was a typically ambivalent Long Island day. The sky was grey and the wind gusted, occasionally fiercely. At unpredictable moments it thundered and rain poured from the sky. A band and team of cheerleaders from the local high school marched up the road, passing underneath a large bridge made from yellow and blue balloons strung together in neat stripes, fastened to lampposts on either side of the road. Gusts blew the balloon bridge around, so that it sometimes bent and twisted and even wrapped itself around one of the lampposts, looking like a huge yellow and blue caterpillar tortured by electric shocks.

A large tent had been erected in the parking lot of the main RHIC building, in front of which was a stage for the politicians. Two banners were hung directly in their field of vision: “RHIC: extraordinary tool for extraordinary science” and “RHIC: ISO 14001 registered! Dedicated to protecting our environment”. The politicians delivered their speeches. Richardson disappeared inside the building for a press conference.

Outside, the skies opened up again. The cheerleaders regrouped and gamely began making pyramids in the pouring rain. The caterpillar started to look more and more frazzled, its formerly striped coat now a chaos of blue and yellow spots. The gusts began to tear off the balloons – sometimes singly, sometimes in groups of two and three – flying away from the disintegrating bridge, moving almost horizontally in the strong wind, like the fragments of a colliding balloon event. Richardson departed. The crowd dispersed. The scientists went back to work, still trying to get control over the beam in the yellow ring.

The critical point

Today’s accelerators, it seems, are so large and complex that their “official completion” is a nebulous concept. Even the dedication has effectively been split into two events with separate functions. Lederman’s feigned impression as he dedicated the Fermilab machine, oddly enough, has come to pass. Official dedications today are for the outsiders. The scientists themselves will get together on an entirely different occasion – arranged around their own schedules – to share the excitement of the first results. For them, this conference will be the real dedication – the celebration of their entry into a new domain.