boyce dawkins mcdaniel (june 11, 1917 – may 8, 2002) was an american nuclear physicist who worked on the manhattan project and later directed the cornell university laboratory of nuclear studies (lns). mcdaniel was skilled in constructing "atom smashing" devices to study the fundamental structure of matter and helped to build the most powerful particle accelerators of his time. together with his graduate student, he invented the pair spectrometer.