NTU Heritage Hall of Physics

Among the various NTU Museums, the NTU Heritage Hall of Physics is quite unique. Built in just the past few years, it tells the story of how a group of Taiwanese scientists gave their all to build a linear particle accelerator laboratory in the years immediately after World War II.

In 1948, Professor Hsu Yuin-chi (a graduate of the NTU Department of Electrical Engineering) and technicians Lin Song-yun, Hsu Yi-­chuan, and Chou Muh-chen made the best of the limited equipment and materials at their disposal to carry out an acceleration experiment at the original Nuclear Physics Laboratory, which today is the location of the NTU Heritage Hall of Physics. They successfully repeated an experiment originally carried out by a team led by Professor Bun­saku Ara­katsu when NTU was still known as Tai­hoku Imperial University. To do the experiment, Arakatsu’s team had built the world’s second particle accelerator, which Hsu’s team replicated, the original having been dismantled.

Chen ­Haide, a volunteer guide at the Heritage Hall, explains that in order to generate the burst of high voltage needed for the experiment, the Taiwan Power Company installed a special power line to the laboratory.

Says Chen: “Some higher-ups saw the experiment as a step toward developing atomic weapons and retaking the mainland. But they didn’t realize that, due to the politics of the day, the accelerator they had worked so hard to build would soon have to be dismantled. The dismantling was done so thoroughly, in fact, that it was as though the accelerator had never even existed.”

The force behind the establishment of Heritage Hall, historian Chang Hsin-chen, says that she had originally intended only to write about the experiment, but during the course of interviews with the grizzled old technicians, the men revealed a little-known fact: unhappy at being ordered to dismantle the accelerator, they had secretly hidden the parts in scattered locations around the Physics Department, including the nooks and crannies of warehouses, spaces above the dropped ceilings in bathrooms, and underground storage rooms.

Support from the NTU Museums Cooperation and Development Plan filled the old fellows with excitement. Putting on their reading glasses, they retrieved old documents and helped the staffers from the Cooperation and Development Plan to understand them. Some went a step further and reassembled parts of the accelerator. When the Heritage Hall opened in 2006, their eyes brimmed with tears.

­Chang explains that the purpose of the museum is to show the intense commitment demonstrated by the scholars of an earlier generation. Indeed, ­Chang’s involvement with the museum was a very enlightening experience for her: “I didn’t really understand the key technologies involved in the development of nuclear physics in Taiwan until I rubbed elbows with people in the scientific community, got my hands on the equipment, and even helped to assemble some of it. I learned about lots of things that were used in that long-ago nuclear physics experiment, such as the polonium contained in the local hokutolite stone, and distilled heavy water. You can’t get this kind of knowledge just from books.”