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Brookhaven National Laboratory
| Article
# : |
13620 |
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Section : |
NATURAL SCIENCE
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| Issue
Date : |
4 / 1988 |
2,787 Words |
| Author
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Bernice Petersen
Bernice Petersen is a free-lance writer living on Long Island,
New York. She is the former editor of the Brookhaven Bulletin,
a publication of the Brookhaven National Laboratory. |
Looking at this Laboratory from the outside, we see, of course, a collection of distinguished scientists and many of us come to visit them. But the Lab as a lab looks like an enormous version of the instrument in the cafeteria that dispenses soft drinks. There are a large number of faucets. Out of some of them come neutrons, out of other come photons in a variety of wavelengths, and out of still others come protons or ions or electrons.
--Frederick Richards, Yale University
Where once a young sergeant named Irving Berlin contemplated Army life and wrote "Oh, How I Hate to Get Up in the Morning," some 56 years later a young scientist named Samuel Ting from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, investigating the structure of matter, discovered a new particle. These men had two things in common: In their different ways, they were both interested in the eternal verities, and unlikely as it seems, they made their investigations at the same place.
In Berlin's time, World War I, the place was known as Camp Upton, but when Ting performed his experiments there in 1974, it had long since shed its war trappings and had evolved into Brookhaven National Laboratory (BNL). For his work there, Samuel C.C. Ting was a winner of the Nobel Prize in physics in 1976.
Brookhaven is a multidisciplinary laboratory supported by the federal government, where scientists from every corner of the globe engage in fundamental and applied research in the physical and life sciences. It is best known for its work in high-energy physics, but biological and chemical systems have also been minutely examined there, and its other research has encompassed such diverse fields as air pollution, nuclear safety, and the analysis of Rembrandt paintings.
The laboratory site on Long Island, about 60 miles from New York City, was an Army training center in both World Wars I and II. During the Depression, the Civilian Conservation Corps also had its "troops" there and they planted acres of trees.
Today, the site resembles a large, well-kept university campus. Some 300 buildings--from simple cinder-block structures built in World War II to modern chemistry labs--are concentrated on 1,000 acres of a 5,265-acre site. The large white dome on Cornell Avenue houses the reactor, and the low, sleek building on Brookhaven Avenue contains the National Synchrotron Light Source (NSLS). By and large, the streets are named after the sponsoring
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