Foreword
Accelerators were invented in the early 1930s and first developed in a significant way by E.O. Lawrence at the University
of California, at Berkeley. Initial ideas arose in response to
the needs of particle physics expressed by Ernest Rutherford
as early as 1924, but right from the outset, Lawrence used
his early cyclotron accelerators for both pure research in particle (then called nuclear) physics and more practical applications. Much of the development was funded by their use
in the field of medicine for isotope production and therapy.
After the World War II years 1939 to 1945, came the invention of the synchrotron — a clever extension of the cyclotron
principle to undercut the rising cost of cyclotrons and extend
their energy range to allow the production of more massive
fundamental particles. Readers who follow the description
of the TRIZ inventive process in this book may wonder if this
invention was an accidental example of what TRIZ calls the
“Russian Doll” technique.
Soon it was realized that electron synchrotrons were a
prolific and controllable source of synchrotron radiation, initially in the ultraviolet spectrum and later down to the wavelengths of X-rays. A large number of these SR sources were
built and their beams used for scattering experiments, to
fathom the structure of new materials for engineering and
elucidate the molecular structure of protein and the other
complex molecules that have come to dominate our understanding of today’s life sciences. To extend the scope of these
studies in order to allow single molecules to be reconstructed
from their scattering patterns, a completely new concept —
the free electron laser — was invented. This has already been
used in several countries as a basis for the construction of
research facilities that rival the large colliders of particle
physics in scale and budget. Finding a new approach to the
production of X-rays in this way has been another leap in human imagination, opening the door to new and more powerful applications in a field where those applications bear an
almost immediate return on investment. It is the purpose of
this book to explore how such leaps in imagination may be
stimulated.
To be significant, such inventive processes need to identify a symbiotic relationship between two apparently quite
different fields — for the free electron laser these were accelerators and lasers — and then find a common factor that
can be used to improve both fields. This technique has been
recently developed and refined as a replacement for simple
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Accelerators were invented in the early 1930s and first developed in a significant way by E.O. Lawrence at the University
of California, at Berkeley. Initial ideas arose in response to
the needs of particle physics expressed by Ernest Rutherford
as early as 1924, but right from the outset, Lawrence used
his early cyclotron accelerators for both pure research in particle (then called nuclear) physics and more practical applications. Much of the development was funded by their use
in the field of medicine for isotope production and therapy.
After the World War II years 1939 to 1945, came the invention of the synchrotron — a clever extension of the cyclotron
principle to undercut the rising cost of cyclotrons and extend
their energy range to allow the production of more massive
fundamental particles. Readers who follow the description
of the TRIZ inventive process in this book may wonder if this
invention was an accidental example of what TRIZ calls the
“Russian Doll” technique.
Soon it was realized that electron synchrotrons were a
prolific and controllable source of synchrotron radiation, initially in the ultraviolet spectrum and later down to the wavelengths of X-rays. A large number of these SR sources were
built and their beams used for scattering experiments, to
fathom the structure of new materials for engineering and
elucidate the molecular structure of protein and the other
complex molecules that have come to dominate our understanding of today’s life sciences. To extend the scope of these
studies in order to allow single molecules to be reconstructed
from their scattering patterns, a completely new concept —
the free electron laser — was invented. This has already been
used in several countries as a basis for the construction of
research facilities that rival the large colliders of particle
physics in scale and budget. Finding a new approach to the
production of X-rays in this way has been another leap in human imagination, opening the door to new and more powerful applications in a field where those applications bear an
almost immediate return on investment. It is the purpose of
this book to explore how such leaps in imagination may be
stimulated.
To be significant, such inventive processes need to identify a symbiotic relationship between two apparently quite
different fields — for the free electron laser these were accelerators and lasers — and then find a common factor that
can be used to improve both fields. This technique has been
recently developed and refined as a replacement for simple
xxv