Robert R. Wilson: Shaping Matter

Robert Rathbun Wilson (1914–2000) was a physicist, best known for building and directing Fermilab, one of the world’s most important centers of high-energy physics [1,2]. Wilson completed his doctorate degree at the University of California at Berkeley with E.O. Lawrence, the inventor of the cyclotron, a machine designed to create subatomic particles. Wilson went on to build some of the most powerful cyclotrons, first with Enrico Fermi at Princeton, then on the Manhattan Project and, after World War II, at Harvard and Cornell. Despite his illustrious career, Wilson nearly left physics to become a professional sculptor in the late 1960s [3]. The offer to build Fermilab in 1967 not only renewed his career in physics but also provided an unparalleled opportunity to practice his art. Wilson had been interested in sculpture since childhood. He had always liked making things [4], as many experimental physicists do, but he expressed it in unusual ways. “When I was a graduate student at Berkeley,” he said, “I used to go into the lab at night when no one was there and construct big, kind of scary figures from whatever was lying around and leave them there for people to find the next day” [5]. He also carved figures of horses out of wood and sculpted portraits of his children. In 1960, at the age of 46, Wilson took a sabbatical year in Rome to study stone carving and began making nudes and abstract sculpture. Within a few years, Wilson recalled, he “was selling a lot of art . . . getting commissions and making bigger and bigger things” [6]. That is when he began contemplating art as a new profession. Fortunately, Fermilab represented a challenge that permitted Wilson to integrate his two passions. It was sited in the middle of an Illinois prairie 40 miles west of Chicago. The setting triggered in Wilson a memory of driving across the fields of France and suddenly seeing the cathedral of Chartres rising majestically above the landscape. Wilson wanted Fermilab to rise out of the fields of Illinois in the same inspiring way, a monument to the greatest cultural achievements of modern science and art. To achieve his goal, he took an active hand in every aspect of the architecture and cyclotron design [7,8]. After working through seven architectural firms, he conceived the modern cathedral that he wanted, although based on Beauvais rather than Chartres (Fig. 1). He hated the look of standard power-line poles, so he convinced Commonwealth Edison to permit him to use white poles that he had designed to look like the Greek letter pi. A water-pumping station became an Archimedean spiral, swirling out of the ground like the water it pumped. The stairwell to the proton control center was a double helix, in honor of the breakthroughs in molecular biology. Even the elements of the cyclotron were touched by his artistic vision. The collider magnet stands were ornamental as well as functional. A capacitor tree for storing and discharging huge electrical currents literally turned into a work of art. He also designed a huge sculpture called Broken Symmetry---representing the constant interplay between symmetry and asymmetry in the history of physical theory---under which visitors had to drive as they approached the lab. Wilson used the same artistic design process in building his new cyclotron. “In designing an accelerator,” he wrote,