IV - The new laboratory

Summary

It will cost a billion dollars, ten billion volts 'twill give,

It will take five thousand scholars seven years to make it live …

Take away your billion dollars, take away your tainted gold,

You can keep your damn ten billion volts, my soul will not be sold.

– © Arthur Roberts, “Take Away Your Billion Dollars” (also known as the Brookhaven National Anthem) (1946)

By toil and sweat the Soviets have reached ten billion volts,

Shall we downtrodden physicists submit? No, no – revolt!…

Oh, if we outbuild the Russians, it will be because we spend

Give, oh give those billion dollars, let them flow without an end.

–© Arthur Roberts, “Ten Years Later” (1956)

Don Glaser watched and wondered as the bubbles rose within,

And said, how do those bubbles know just where they should begin?

And once the crucial question framed, the answer too was slated

Beneath our hero's onslaught fierce to be elucidated…

The bubble chamber now is made of sterner stuff than beer,

It's run by corporations huge on megabucks per year,

The beam dumps pulse, the cameras click, the great computers chatter,

Vast cohorts grind the answers out; some do, some do not matter…

–© Arthur Roberts, “Birth of the Bubble Chamber,” (1956)