Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory

In 1928, physics professor Ernest O. Lawrence left his faculty position at Yale University for a job at the University of California's Berkeley campus. While at Berkeley, Lawrence invented a unique particle accelerator called a cyclotron that would prove his hypothesis: whirling charged particles around to boost their energies then casting them toward a target is an effective way to smash open atomic nuclei. Lawrence won the 1939 Nobel Prize in physics for the cyclotron, and ushered in a new era in the study of subatomic particles.