Thomas Langley

Eppur si Muova

Dr. Robert Wilson was a very practical man. He was amongst the pioneers of nuclear and particle physics and developed smaller, cheaper, and yet more powerful particle accelerators and methods for detecting and observing objects that are smaller than light. At the time (1969) nuclear and particle physics was mostly theoretical and it promised no real applications (exactly as the study of electricity was thought to be useless for years after its discovery). As Wilson helped to pioneer the study of nuclear physics and lead in the battle to construct the tools necessary to understand the structure of not just atoms but of matter itself the United States was embroiled in a cold war of ideas about how to spend money and who should sell bread. Much, and by much we mean significantly more than half, of the US budget each year was being spent on building the biggest guns in order to show the then USSR that Communism would never work. Even though the most powerful of the weapons ever made, that at that time were being made by the hundreds (then thousands), were developed from the discoveries of nuclear physics the Congress of the US had reservations about the large investment the Department of Energy and Dr. Wilson wanted to make in a new facility to experimentally study particle physics (0.001% of the total budget that year, but paid out over almost ten years so really 0.0001%).