We learned yesterday — or overnight, for those of us on the other side of Atlantic and asleep for the wrong part of the American news cycle — that President-elect Barack Obama’s choice for Secretary of Energy will be Steve Chu. This is very exciting news. Not only is Dr. Chu a Nobel Prize-winning physicist — rather unusual for an Energy Secretary, since after all the Department of Energy has far more under its purview than just the Office of Science — he’s also the director of my lab, Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory. I can imagine that the atmosphere back in Berkeley today will be electric.
I hope I can be forgiven, with the nomination so “close to home” on so many levels, for thinking a little bit in particular about how my field of research will be affected. Of course, Sean Carroll is right when he says that “just because Chu is an accomplished physicist, this doesn’t mean that researchers should expect a bonanza of new funds.” Certainly there’s no reason to anticipate such a bonanza for particle physics. Although Berkeley Lab’s founding project was particle accelerator research, and we still have quite a number of excellent particle physicists (if I do say so myself), over the decades it has developed a very diverse research program and a focus on bringing together different disciplines to solve real-world problems. This interdisciplinary environment has been expanded during Dr. Chu’s tenure as Lab Director, and his particular focus has been on the development of technology to address energy resources and climate change. His interest and expertise in this area is doubtless one of the key reasons that he has been selected for the new job.
This past January, during the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory ATLAS group’s annual “back to the mothership” group meeting in Berkeley, Director Chu joined us for dinner one evening and gave a brief, informal talk. Of course, he couldn’t say what he might like to say to every group at the Lab, that our research was his top priority, because that wasn’t true. But what he did say is that fundamental research, including fundamental particle physics research, is a critical part of any long-term effort to address concrete problems. He was very aware of the ongoing funding difficulties that our field is having, both in terms of the complexities on the political side and of the effects that uncertain and diminished funding have on the operation of our experiments and laboratories. I came away with a sense that, although he had many things to focus on beyond my own area of research, he knew a lot about our work and had an extraordinary understanding of how it fit into the big picture.
For Dr. Chu, the picture is now getting far larger. His nomination comes along with several other officials who will be dedicated to environmental and energy issues, and we can expect his first priority as Secretary of Energy to be working with them and with the President on a new national policy in those areas. I hope he will also be able to work with the Congress on stabilizing funding for particle physics and preserving what he calls the “intellectual capital” of our scientists, engineers, and technicians working at places like Fermilab. From what I’ve seen, he has the knowledge and perspective necessary to keep pace with the many tasks that will require his attention as Secretary of Energy, and to balance our nation’s urgent needs in terms of energy policy with our long-term interest in continued excellence in fundamental science.
Thanks for posting this important info! It’s the first I’ve heard of the appointment – news in Illinois is too tied up with the governor’s indictment (so what else is new!). Ironically and disgustedly enough, “Gov” Blago is reputed to have had angles on the Energy slot for himself, in some convoluted plan of “pay for play”. Thank goodness, the Prez Elect is showing far more sense than that!
Isn’t it nice to have the adults back in charge in Washinton.
I too am impressed with his credentials however two observations. Americans have missed their chance at leadership judging by the location of the LHC, Cern etc. And we’ve got Hawking coming to CANADA!! The American dream of solar power, green power, will find you shivering in the dark soon, just like the oil shock of the summer. When the lights go out it still takes ten years to build a nuclear power plant. Hopefully a physicist will include that in his master plan for America’s sake.
Hi Paul, I have to admit that I don’t follow what Dr. Hawking moving from the University of Cambridge to the Perimeter Institute has to do with American science and technology leadership, but let me respond to a few other comments.
It’s no secret that the United States strives for nothing less than global leadership at almost everything we set our hand to, and it’s no secret that we don’t always succeed. But what fun is a little friendly intercontinental competition of you always win? We are certainly about to enter an era where Europe rather than the United States will be host to the next round of discoveries in large-scale particle accelerator experiments. However, we should be clear that “falling short” of leadership means that the United States is “only” one of the most important contributors to the LHC effort. The nation has spent hundreds of millions of dollars on the construction of the accelerator and its experiments. If I remember correctly, the United States contributes the most physicists of any nation to ATLAS by a small margin, and the most to CMS by a large margin. (See here for more information about U.S. contributions to the LHC.) And all this has been done while hosting the Tevatron at Fermilab, which remains the world’s most powerful running hadron collider and is collecting data faster and faster and producing important new results all the time.
Personally, I’ve chosen to work on the LHC, and I’m delighted to work with European friends and colleagues on their home turf. I’m sure that the European graduate students working at Fermilab are equally delighted to be there — except perhaps for the public transportation situation in Chicago’s west suburbs, which is difficult to say the least.
Regarding realism in energy policy: going beyond idealism to finding solutions that will really work has been one of the hallmarks of Steve Chu’s efforts on new energy technology. One example is the lab’s partnership (along with the Berkeley campus and the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign) with energy giant BP on the Energy Biosciences Institute. While this kind of agreement with a profit-making corporation has been controversial, it’s also an acknowledgment that the energy crisis will be solved by technologies that can be practically built and marketed on a large scale. I’m sure that Dr. Chu will bring the same practicality to his work as Secretary of Energy.
As far as the location of the LHC… didn’t at least some of the tunnels it uses already exist from previous particle physics experiments at CERN? I’m not sure whether it would make sense to move the tunnels to the US.