The legacy of Liverpool's forgotten synchrocyclotron (opens in new tab)

> “The country was still recovering from the war, so it was amazing that the government had prioritized building a particle accelerator in 1947 and 1948,” Houlden adds, pointing out an image of the Liverpool skyline at the time of the accelerator’s construction in 1951 that shows cranes in the city still repairing damage from German bombing.

IIR, close US/UK cooperation on nuclear research ended when WWII did, and the UK found itself recast as a junior bottle-washer. There likely was a whole lot of national pride behind that budgetary decision.

Edit - here's the history:

https://ukdefencejournal.org.uk/the-early-years-of-britains-...

As a Scouser with an interest in physics I'm ashamed to have known nothing about this :(

What a wonderfully composed article that balanced telling of the science involved within the social political and economic context (for this lay person at least). The transfer of technologies and academics further westward reminds me a bit of “How the Irish Saved Civilization’s” thesis regarding certain monasteries preservation of knowledge during the post-Roman period of Western Europe. A pity for Ireland that it wasn’t as able to capitalize on the role as the US after WWII.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/How_the_Irish_Saved_Civilizati...

Wild. I grew up in Liverpool and studied Comp Sci there in the mid-1990s, and remember one of the buildings named after Chadwick. But I had lost interested in physics after my A-level, so I can't remember if this was mentioned or if I knew about it.

Loads of shit in the basement in the chemistry department, physics dept. etc. There's quite a few lead sarcophagus that we've labelled no go ha.

There is a mistake in this article, which is honestly a bit shocking. CPT symmetry is still known to be conserved. The discovery at the time was the violation of CP symmetry.