Cyclotron'S Last Stand.(The Talk of the Town)

One morning this month, George Hamawy, Columbia University's director of radiation safety, stood before a group of students crowded into a basement laboratory and delivered a eulogy for one of the university's most talked-about secrets: a sixty-five-ton magnet with a history.

"In a week or two, they will dismantle it, and they will sell it for scrap," Hamawy said, motioning toward an enormous iron arch--twelve feet wide and eight feet high--in the middle of the room. Beneath the arch were two electromagnets that looked like hockey pucks, if hockey pucks were the height of small children. "If they want to condemn it to death," he continued, "let's give it a funeral."

Hamawy was referring to the school's decision to get rid of what was left of its cyclotron, a particle accelerator that had been used in some of the experiments that led to the development of the atomic bomb. "This is the last chance to see it," Hamawy told the students, before inviting them to poke around. One young man bent close to inspect a bolt, while a few people furtively picked pieces of metal from the machine and slipped them into their pockets. Joshua Reich, a Ph.D. candidate in computer science, mugged for a picture, gripping the side of the cyclotron as if it were the shoulder of an old friend.

When the cyclotron was still in use, the magnetic field created by the combination of the iron arch and the electromagnets forced particles into speeding spiral paths, so they could be smashed apart. It was built by the Columbia physicist John Dunning in the late nineteen-thirties. In 1939, Dunning used it to help confirm reports of nuclear fission that had come from Europe. The same year, it aided scientists who proved that uranium 235, a rare isotope, was the prime fissionable form of uranium, a verification that was instrumental in creating the atomic bomb. In 1965, it was decommissioned and gutted. The Smithsonian got everything but the arch and the magnets, which were too heavy ...