BERKELEY, California—What was once the world’s biggest atom smasher will soon be nothing more than a collection of old photos and the dust beneath the next big science machine.

Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory’s Bevatron, built by the Atomic Energy Commission for $9 million in the early '50s, is slowly being demolished in the hills overlooking San Francisco Bay. In a few years, all traces of it will be gone.

The Bevatron was a marvel, that, when compared to the rest of the human world drew ridiculous comparisons. Popular Science called it a “10,000-Ton Cracker for Invisible Nuts” and rapturously listed its dimensions. For boys of all ages, the Bevatron’s stats were the 36-24-36 of physics.

“It is 135 feet across, cost $9,500,000 and contains more than 9,500 tons of iron, 225 miles of wire, and 2,400 vacuum tubes,” wrote Darrell Huff in Popular Science. “This is the bevatron, just completed, the most powerful atom-smasher yet built.”

The Bevatron occupied 125,000 square feet of land at the center of Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory. It was once the crown jewel of the lab, of the National Lab system and of the particle physics world.

What it would actually do — the physics of the thing — was probably obscure to most readers of Popular Science. The enormous size of this mechanical monument belied the tiny scale on which it really worked.

“It takes this mammoth to smash atoms, which are so small 20,000,000 just span a pinhead,” Huff wrote in a photo caption.

Between 1954 and 1960, this mammoth was the envy of physics world. Just a year after its completion, scientists used it to find the antiproton, a discovery which yielded a Nobel Prize for Emilio Segré and Owen Chamberlain, and provided confirmation that symmetry existed. Particles did have antiparticles. Antimatter was definitively real.

The 135-foot diameter Bevatron was the largest in a series of circular particle accelerators invented by E. O. Lawrence, after whom Lawrence Berkeley and Lawrence Livermore National Labs are named. The first cyclotron, constructed in 1930, was a mere four inches across. It was followed by a string of ever larger machines, with diameters of 9, 11, 27, 37 and 60 inches. In 1942, Lawrence built the 184-inch cyclotron which aided in the separation of uranium isotopes for use in the atomic bomb and created the first artificial mesons.

Science historian Alvin Weinberg noted that Lawrence created not just a series of machines that enabled scientific discoveries, but an entirely new way of doing science.

“The new style of big science based on very large pieces of equipment is generally attributed to Ernest O. Lawrence,” Weinberg wrote. “His 37-inch cyclotron at Berkeley was a monster for its time; this was followed by the 60-inch, the 184-inch, the synchrocyclotron, the proton synchrotron (Bevatron), in ever-increasing size and complexity.”

Physicist Paul Dirac developed a set of equations that predicted the existence of antimatter more than 20 years before it was confirmed, by uniting Einstein’s special relativity with some quantum mechanics. The equations correctly predicted the existence of the positron, the electron’s antiparticle, but no particle accelerator was powerful enough to test the theory for protons. The energy necessary to produce a particle is proportional to its mass and protons are roughly 2,000 times more massive than electrons. Creating a proton-antiproton pair would take one incredible machine.

A case had to be made that this bit of science, probing the elementary particles of the universe, was more important than, say, poverty or more airplanes or building freeways. Social skills and budgetary maneuvering, cutting deals with the Atomic Energy Commissioners — these were the things that would bring about fundamental new discoveries when harnessed to smart physics.

Lawrence was the man for the job.

Lawrence was an incredible political operator who could put together the funding and team to get such a machine built and keep it operating. Scientists the world over knew theoretically where to look for antiprotons. They knew what kind of energies it would take to find them. The skill, then, was to marshal the political capital to generate the actual capital to build and operate the powerful proton accelerator.

“He was as adept at fund raising as at building new devices,” the American Institute of Physics remarks in its history of Lawrence.

Lawrence touted his early radiation research as key to understanding cancer. Later, he sold his physics as necessary for keeping up with the Russians. If he were alive now, high-energy physics would probably be the key to stopping terrorism or fixing the economy.

Lawrence had a new set of skills for a new era of scientific research.

Big Science, as it’s called, is systematized and formal. It’s kind of corporate. You can see its mark on nearly every modern paper in the long lists of co-authors. Whereas early in the 20th century, a paper was likely to result from one beautiful mind, by the '50s Lawrence had transferred the beauty to the machines, with brilliant scientists tending to them like bees in hives.

“Lawrence's laboratory was probably the first in which the central piece of equipment was so elaborate, and possibly so temperamental, as to require a more or less full-time engineering staff,” Weinberg continued. “The logistics of keeping the place going —whether this means the scientific machinery or the elaborate organization that tends the machinery — becomes an essential ingredient of the activity.”

From 1950 until today, the average number of authors of a paper in Nature has quadrupled.

The reception of science changed in Big Science, too. The machine to do the science became more newsworthy than the science itself.

The Bevatron’s completion made the front page of The New York Times. The publication of the Nobel Prize-winning paper in which the antiproton was announced wasn't even in the front section of the paper. The Times described it as “important” but “no great surprise.” Such a huge machine, and all to confirm a few scribbles from some British guy, Waldemar Kaempffert, the Times science writer, wrote.

Emilio Segrè, one of the Nobel winners, also felt the technological achievement of the Bevatron was bigger than its scientific contribution. When he looked back on his life, too, the antiproton didn’t stick out as his most satisfying discovery. Instead, the new elements he discovered felt most important.

“The antiproton is a very interesting thing, but, you see, the new elements—this is now quite personal—is something done at the bottom of Sicily by myself and only myself with very small means,” Segrè said. “The antiproton I had behind myself a Bevatron, lots of people helping, a strong presumption that it would be there; so it's a technical achievement, a respectable technical achievement.”

The model for the discovery of the antiproton wasn’t Einstein, it was Ford, and that’s just not quite as romantic.

“We were the first to do it because we were the first to have the machine,” Segrè once said.

Now, though, that machine is being reduced to a pile of junk. Steel truss by steel truss, concrete shield by concrete shield, the Bevatron is being disassembled. Physicists extended its useful life for years after it lost its high-energy lead by creatively recombining it with other equipment, but the end eventually came. When the demolition is completed in 2011, it will have cost $72 million.

The Bevatron was decommissioned in 1993. An old man pushed a button with a Scotch-taped handmade sign on it that read, “Atom Smasher Offer,” and a small group of physicists quietly applauded. For the last decade, it has sat unused on Berkeley Lab's space-constrained campus. Now, it’s coming down and being hauled out with the help of stimulus money.

Some of its concrete, the non-radioactive stuff, could be pulverized and recycled into highways or strip malls. It will take a total of three-and-a-half years to dismantle. Around 4,700 truck trips will be required to transport its remains.

Even in death, the Bevatron’s scale is eye popping.