Columbia University dismantles cyclotron

The cyclotron, with Enrico Fermi (middle).

Via Slashdot, Columbia University is dismantling the cyclotron the provided studies for the rise of nuclear power and the atomic bomb. This was the lab from which the Manhattan Project received its name.
From the New Yorker article:

Elizabeth Wade, a Barnard senior, first sneaked down to see it with some friends during her freshman year. “It was this big dark, stormy night,” Wade, a comparative-literature major, recalled. After evading security guards and traversing the tunnels, the group reached the basement of the physics building, armed with word-of-mouth instructions: Find the out-of-order men’s bathroom, and send the skinniest person in your party shimmying up the heating vent and into the hallway of the abandoned laboratories, where she can open the door for everyone else.

Inside, Wade and her friends followed a trail of graffitied clues that led to the cyclotron. They worried that it might be radioactive (it’s not), but were awed nonetheless. “It looked like science fiction,” she remembered. “It was kind of mythical.”

Both Wade and Columbia employees report feelings of awe and wonder at the now-inert machine. Connected to this machine was the Trinity test, named for divinity. These feelings are a lot to load onto a machine.

One Slashdot commenter pointed out that it isn’t the machine that’s important, but what the machine represents and stands for. Many scientists used it as a tool for noble and ignoble studies. It stands for something much larger than it’s 65-ton self. The University of Manitoba’s funeral for their IBM 650 has much the same purpose: to honor a machines that aided humans in changing the world and in changing themselves.