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. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Iowa City, Iowa—September 1935.Onahot,Sundayafternoon in September 1935, Alfred Van Allen parked the Dodge at the side of the house and James loaded two suitcases into the trunk for a more permanent stay at what was then called theStateUniversityofIowa.Onesuitcaseheldclothesandthe otherheldbooksand,ofcourse,asliderule.TheDodgepulled away from the town where James had spent most of his life and headed north 50 miles to Iowa City. • • • That fall, Van Allen rented a room for $14 a month on the second floor of a rooming house at 223 Linn Street, a short walk fromMacLeanHall,onthesouthwestcornerofthehilltophub of the campus known as the Pentacrest. Van Allen took all his classes during four years of graduate school in that same building. The five-story building offered state-of-the-art laboratories and a shop where master instrument maker Joseph Sentinella could create almost any gadget the physicists needed. “He was the graduate student’s best friend,” as Van Allen described him. Van Allen barely saw his dorm room except to sleep. He spent twelve hours a day in classes, doing research and learningtheshop ,sometimescatchingaquickmealatthesodafountain of nearby Pearson’s Drug Store. He felt both inclined and obligated to ignore the rest of campus life. In the depths of the depression, only four high school classmates went on to college , let alone graduate school. Most took jobs in family businesses or on the farms and many had started families of their own. Alfred paid all his sons’ college expenses and, naturally frugal,Jameshadlittletimeordesiretopurchasemuchofanything else. He didn’t even incur a monthly laundry expense. He simply boxed his dirty clothes in a cardboard suitcase and The Making of a Scientist 3 sent it home to his mother who washed everything and shipped it back. But the mundane world slipped away in MacLean Hall. Physics was turning the seemingly precise world of space and time into a grandillusion.WithindaysofGermany’sdefeatonthebattlefieldsofWorldWar I, German physicist Max Planck received the Nobel Prize for his quantum theory of radiation. Energy and light didn’t flow in a steady stream, as scientists, poets, and philosophers had assumed for centuries. Instead, it burst forth in packets, or quanta, at distinct frequencies regulated by a universal constant— Planck’s constant. And energy was interchangeable with matter—interchangeable at the rate of E=mc2 as Albert Einstein proved in 1905 in his Special Theory of Relativity. Releasing all that energy from a small amount of matter opened the door to staggering powers of destruction and optimistic hopes of unlimited cheap energy. Few people understood the promise or the peril. James Van Allen started graduate school with a solid grounding in classical physics but knew almost nothing about the breakthroughs in quantum mechanics and nuclear physics that revolutionized the work of many physicists in MacLean Hall. MacLean Hall carried the name of former university president George Edward MacLean, a man who didn’t need the start of a scientific revolution to turn the campus upside down. University of Iowa historian Stow Persons compared life at the college before MacLean took the reins in 1899 to a “a sedate game of croquet just before the eruption of a volcano.” But the quiet, courtly MacLean adapted the changing East Coast ideas about rigorous academics to the University of Iowa. He created the blueprint for the professional graduate schools out of undergraduate departments specializing in law, medicine, homeopathy, dentistry, and pharmacy. MacLean revamped the catchall collegiate program into modern undergraduate departments and added new disciplines in economics, statistics, Scandinavian languages, physical education, speech, Greek art, and archeology . He also went on a building spree, erecting the four buildings surrounding Iowa’s Old Capital building on the Pentacrest. The gray limestone and neoclassical formality of all five buildings created a coherent hub from which the university mushroomed in all directions. Each building had singular architecturalflourishessuchastheexteriorcorniceonthe1910physicsbuildingthat bears MacLean’s name, a building carved with the names of great physicists and astronomers—Galileo, Newton, Ohm, Cavendish, Faraday, Fresnel, and a host of others. These men laid the groundwork for an orderly universe where physical laws applied without exceptions. The laws described the operations of electricity, magnetism, mechanics, acoustics, and optics, a world of classi36 The Making of a Scientist cal physics that had been taught at the university since the first science classes began there in 1856 as part of the Department of Natural Philosophy. Physics department head George W. Stewart directed every detail of the construction of the $225,000 MacLean Hall, including placement of an elevator shaft. The unfinished elevator did...

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