The legacy of Liverpool's forgotten synchrocyclotron

[bell-cot]

> “The country was still recovering from the war, so it was amazing that the government had prioritized building a particle accelerator in 1947 and 1948,” Houlden adds, pointing out an image of the Liverpool skyline at the time of the accelerator’s construction in 1951 that shows cranes in the city still repairing damage from German bombing.

IIR, close US/UK cooperation on nuclear research ended when WWII did, and the UK found itself recast as a junior bottle-washer. There likely was a whole lot of national pride behind that budgetary decision.

Edit - here's the history:

https://ukdefencejournal.org.uk/the-early-years-of-britains-...

[Pixelbrick]

As a Scouser with an interest in physics I'm ashamed to have known nothing about this :(

[moomin]

I know! It’s not like it’s an obscure location, either. I feel like my grandpa knew everything about Liverpool but “They proved why the universe is made of matter here.” never came up.

[gnufx]

I can't say the history was well-known even generally in the Liverpool department when I was a student, knowing Mike Houlden, and Arthur James, and John Holt less well. I was at least somewhat aware of it, though. I gather the unit of data-taking was the suitcase full of paper tape, but I don't know how that was analyzed.

[adolph]

What a wonderfully composed article that balanced telling of the science involved within the social political and economic context (for this lay person at least). The transfer of technologies and academics further westward reminds me a bit of “How the Irish Saved Civilization’s” thesis regarding certain monasteries preservation of knowledge during the post-Roman period of Western Europe. A pity for Ireland that it wasn’t as able to capitalize on the role as the US after WWII.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/How_the_Irish_Saved_Civilizati...

[sapling-ginger]

Wow, some people really can't stomach the idea of the Arabs and Persians saving Europe, do they?

[msephton]

Wild. I grew up in Liverpool and studied Comp Sci there in the mid-1990s, and remember one of the buildings named after Chadwick. But I had lost interested in physics after my A-level, so I can't remember if this was mentioned or if I knew about it.

[gnufx]

The Chadwick building is on a different site, if that's not clear, like. Shame on losing interest in Physics!

[aaaddd]

http://theness.com/neurologicablog/index.php/inside-out-a-ne...

[PlasmonOwl]

Loads of shit in the basement in the chemistry department, physics dept. etc. There's quite a few lead sarcophagus that we've labelled no go ha.

[gnufx]

I don't remember a basement in the Oliver Lodge building, but I don't think there was much highly active after the tandem went, other than small short-lived sources made in the Universities research reactor.

[slashdave]

There is a mistake in this article, which is honestly a bit shocking. CPT symmetry is still known to be conserved. The discovery at the time was the violation of CP symmetry.

[bluish29]

Whilt you are correct that CPT violation is not supported by experiments (yet), the article was mentioning explicity that this was a competition to confirm C violation.

Hint: I did not downvote you