deuton

As the Solvay drew near, interest in the deuton spread beyond Berkeley and the Cavendish, as did doubts about Lawrence’s disintegration theory and, consequently, his calculation for the neutron’s weight.

Lawrence knew the Cavendish delegates were skeptical not only of his deuton theory but also of the cyclotron itself as a laboratory tool.

At the conference, Cockcroft sugarcoated the Cavendish’s doubts about the exploding deuton by labeling Lawrence’s contention not necessarily erroneous but certainly premature: “It is rather superfluous to discuss further the nature of the transformations. . . until we have more experimental information”—preferably from his own accelerator, its current, if not its energies, so much stronger than that of the cyclotron.

The deuton affair was a turning point for the Rad Lab.

It was a solid result, which Lawrence announced promptly with a brief letter to the Physical Review, followed by a lengthy report in which he left nothing to chance, describing his methodology in painstaking detail and accounting for the possibility of contamination; he was determined not to repeat the deuton fiasco.