Biographical Memoirs Volume 85 (2004) / Chapter Skim
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Boyce Dawkins McDaniel
Boyce Dawkins McDaniel
Pages 150-163
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From page 151... ...
For more than half a century Mac played a leading role in the birth, development, and mature phases of accelerators and experimental particle physics. Throughout his career his time, often on a daily basis, was seamlessly divided between administration, accelerator physics, instrumentation, and particle physics.
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From page 152... ...
thesis at Cornell to Los Alamos, where he led a research team that discovered and made accurate measurements of fission induced by resonance absorption of epithermal neutrons in uranium and plutonium. This data made an important contribution to the design of the first nuclear bombs.
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From page 153... ...
Bob Walker described him as the perfect thesis advisor, allowing the student great independence but always there when needed. Under the leadership of Bob Bacher and Hans Bethe the Cornell Laboratory of Nuclear Studies was established in 1946, with Bob Bacher as the director.
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From page 154... ...
Among the early experimental results were precise measurements of the electromagnetic interaction of high-energy gamma rays with nuclei, confirming an important theoretical calculation of Bethe and Heitler, an elegant measurement by Dale Corson of the rate of synchrotron radiation, resolving a theoretical controversy on the subject, an influential measurement by Hartman and Tomboulian of the spectrum of synchrotron radiation, and, most importantly, many measurements of the properties of the pi meson, thought at the time to be responsible for the nuclear force. The discovery in the next few years of several other particles heavier than the pion, all of which appeared to play a role in the nuclear force, showed that the story was more complicated than expected
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From page 155... ...
The machine was smaller, the components easier to build, and the construction time shortened, all of which reduced the costs. One can get some feeling for how radical a change this was from the fact that the 300 MeV magnet weighed 80 tons and the 1 GeV magnet, with four times the radius, weighed only 20 tons.
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From page 156... ...
had approved the project, which was to cost $8 million. At some stage Mac concluded that the two 6 GeV electron synchrotrons operating at that time in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and Hamburg, Germany, would make the 3 GeV machine obsolete by the time we got it.
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From page 157... ...
Helen Edwards, who had been a student of Mac's and was one of the key players in commissioning the 10 GeV machine, described Mac's role in the project in these words. Mac focused specifically on the magnet fabrication, the magnet string test, and seeing that everything got designed, built, and installed.
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From page 158... ...
In 1972 Wilson prevailed on Mac to take a leave of absence from Cornell to assist in commissioning the 400 GeV proton synchrotron. The project was experiencing serious problems with accelerating useable beams beyond 20 GeV, and frequent component failure resulted in intermittent operation.
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From page 159... ...
At about the same time, Maury Tigner invented a very clever scheme to use the synchrotron as an efficient injector for a collider. At that stage the collider looked very attractive, and in May 1975 Mac submitted a proposal to the NSF to "convert" the 10 GeV synchrotron to an 8 GeV (16 GeV center-of-mass energy)
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From page 160... ...
. The text quoted from Bob Wilson was taken from a yearly report to the Office of Naval Research on June 15, 1953, and the texts of Val Fitch, Helen Edwards, and Ned Goldwasser from a memorial service for Mac at Cornell University on September 21, 2003.
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From page 161... ...
Weil. The production of protons from carbon by mono energetic gamma rays.
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From page 162... ...
Neutron form factor measurements using electron neutron coincidences.
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From page 163... ...
NS-28:1984. 1984 Planning for the big proton collider -- SSC.
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