Bodman on Fermilab

Secretary of Energy Samuel Bodman tours Fermilab.

Photo: Reidar Hahn, Fermilab

Bodman on Fermilab
A portion of US Energy Secretary Samuel Bodman's remarks during his visit to Fermilab on April 7, 2006: "Successful futures are built on past successes, and in this respect, you have every reason to be optimistic and confident about your future. The performance of the Tevatron, the most powerful particle accelerator in the world, has been truly successful, and I want you to know that that is noticed and that it is appreciated. You are successfully employing technologies, such as electron cooling, that have never before been used at this energy and scale, to obtain record luminosity. You are consistently raising the bar to levels that allow the observation of those elusive states that define the meaning of mass, or to create supersymmetric particles for the first time since they were produced by the big bang. The Large Hadron Collider at CERN depends on your work. The science there will stand on the shoulders of Fermilab's achievements and experience…Fermilab is currently the most important high-energy physics laboratory in the world. And the future of high-energy physics research in the United States depends on this lab- oratory remaining robust. I fully support the possibility of bringing the International Linear Collider to this lab. There are a great many difficult steps that will be needed for this to occur. This audience understands better than I just what those steps are and how difficult they will be. But it is a goal worth fighting for. This may turn out to be the most profound new science that we will be seeing in our lifetime."