Politics of Major Facilities

Abstract

Although one may argue that astronomical observatories, going back as far as what we now think are neolithic examples, were the first large-scale facilities for scientific observations, and continued to be the only ones until well in the 20^th century, a new dynamic, and in a way, a new, modern era can be traced with some precision to E.O. Lawrence. The imperial aspirations of San Francisco provided the appropriate conditions for Lawrence's grand-scale cyclotron ambitions in the 1930s [1], a first culmination being a $1 million grant from the Rockefeller Foundation in 1940 for his 5^th generation, 184 inch cyclotron (Figure 1).