Abstract.
We examine the roles of vision and leadership in creating and directing Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory from the late 1960s through the 1980s. The story divides into two administrations having different problems and accomplishments, that of Robert R. Wilson from 1967-1978, which saw the transformation from cornfield to frontier physics facility, and that of Leon M. Lederman from 1979-1989, in which the laboratory evolved into one of the world's major high-energy facilities. Lederman's pragmatic vision of a user-based experimental community helped him to convert the pioneering facility that Wilson had built frugally into a laboratory with a stable scientific, cultural, and funding environment.
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ID="*"Lillian Hoddeson is Professor of History at the University of Illinois in Urbana-Champaign and Historian at Fermilab in Batavia, Illinois. She has written extensively on twentieth-century solid-state physics and big science. Her most recent books are with Michael Riordan, Crystal Fire: the Birth of the Information Age (New York: W. W. Norton, 1997), and with Vicki Daitch, True Genius: the Life and Science of John Bardeen (Washington, D.C.: Joseph Henry Press, 2002) and is coauthoring with Michael Riordan, Adrienne Kolb, and Steve Weiss, the forthcoming Tunnel Visions : the Rise and Fall of the Superconducting Super Collider.
ID="**"Adrienne Kolb is Archivist at Fermilab in Batavia, Illinois. She is coauthor of "The Superconducting Super Collider's Frontier Outpost, 1983-1988," Minerva (2000); "The Mirage of the World Accelerator for World Peace and the Origins of the SSC," Historical Studies in the Physical and Biological Sciences (1993); "A New Frontier in the Chicago Suburbs: Settling Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory, 1963-1972," Illinois Historical Journal (1995); and the forthcoming Tunnel Visions : The Rise and Fall of the Superconducting Super Collider.
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Hoddeson, L., Kolb, A. Vision to Reality: From Robert R. Wilson's Frontier to Leon M. Lederman's Fermilab. Phys. perspect. 5, 67–86 (2003). https://doi.org/10.1007/s000160300003
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s000160300003
- Key words. Fermilab; high-energy physics; laboratory; particle accelerator; big science; Robert R. Wilson; Leon M. Lederman.