The Manhattan Project was the primary archetype of big science. For some historians, it was the first genuine big-science project. Evaluations of its success, and of the corresponding failure of the German nuclear program to produce a nuclear weapon, therefore tend to focus on the features of big science—the scale of the resources used, the massive facilities and machines involved, the composition and organization of the sprawling research teams. But even the biggest of big science projects involves elements of small science: individuals or small groups, huddled over lab benches, practicing the skills of the laboratory.

In this issue, Christian Forstner turns our attention to those laboratory practices, asking what they can tell us about the Uranverein, the German “Uranium Club,” the decentralized organization charged with exploring the potential applications of nuclear phenomena to the war effort. Germany was a physics powerhouse in the early twentieth century. It was the cradle of quantum mechanics—a theoretical triumph—and hosted a long and august experimental tradition. That fact has long raised the question of how and why Germany failed to make even modest progress toward a nuclear weapon before the end of the war.

The new and surprising insight Forstner gives us is that it was, at least in part, because of that august experimental tradition that the German nuclear project made little headway. The scientists of the Uranverein, steeped in an early twentieth-century lab-bench culture, conceived of nuclear questions within that tradition and explored fission on the tabletop. The continuity of practice—the endurance of small physics practices, laboratories, and equipment—ensured that the project like those similarly begun early in the war in Britain, the Soviet Union, and the United States proceeded on a scale unsuited to working through the requirements of a nuclear bomb, let alone constructing one. It was particularly when the Manhattan Project was put under military control in August 1942 that nuclear scientists and engineers in the United States, whether Americans or émigrés, worked in a context of discontinuity, and so were compelled to craft new laboratories, instruments, and practices on a scale that made that task both imaginable and achievable.

This insight reminds us of the extent to which small science is often neglected in the historiography of twentieth century physics. The second half of the twentieth century saw the rise of physics projects conceived on a grand scale—nuclear weapons and reactors, particle accelerators, space telescopes. But the workaday laboratory practices Forstner brings to the fore continued. It remains to be seen what other insights await by examining the small alongside the big, as well as the complex relationship between the two.

Christian Forstner tragically and unexpectedly passed away while this issue was in press. His loss is one that our field feels acutely. This article is a reminder of that loss, but it also points the way forward. It shows us how much we have yet to learn by casting old questions in a new light. And it gives us a roadmap for writing small physics more completely into some of the best-known stories of twentieth-century physics.

Joseph D. Martin

Robert L. Naylor

Richard Staley

Institutional author

E-mail: physicsinperspective@gmail.com (for internal communication only)