Every day at 3pm was "coffee and cookies", and my colleagues and I would join the line filled with physicists of all ages and from across the lab, to grab a cookie or maybe two. On Fridays the coffee turned into wine and the cookies into cheese.

The second floor, where the coffee was, had a rotating art installation, which at some point included an acrylic box filled with water. One day this box went from being empty to containing a live goldfish.

I hope Fermilab retains this sense of magic that I have found in so few other places.

The room had been overlooked in the usual surplus process for years. My friend was related to someone working for the janitorial services company, and they'd been told to clean that room out and throw the stuff away. So what we got to do was help with that, and put anything we liked in my car instead of the dumpster.

We were stripping stuff there in the parking lot to save space. Crammed that car full of junk. It was a truly wonderful day.

I toured Fermilab later in college while we where near there for an ACM programming competition. The one thing I remember from the tour was a big red button labeled "Start" next to some huge experiment. The tour guide saw us looking at it and said something like "You don't want to touch that". I've often wondered if that was real or just a prop they used for tours.

Btw, I'll never forget what Leon said when asked by a physics student about what the most important thing to learn or study as an undergrad. He said, "learn to write".

If you need anonymity to talk to a reporter, you already know that DOE has a problem.

> “We did not write a very good contract for the excavation,” ... “There were all kinds of loopholes in it, and the excavation company made an awful lot of money off of us.”

Another thing that strikes me is, why is construction in the U.S. so corrupt and such a money pit? I don't think I have ever heard of a large construction project being delivered on time and on budget. I understand construction is very difficult, but it just seems out of control.

I grew up in the Chicago suburbs and got accepted into the Saturday Morning Physics Program (https://saturdaymorningphysics.fnal.gov/) at Fermilab. Many of the lectures went completely over my head at the time but I was still in awe of the particle accelerator on campus. I actually got lost driving to a different building one Saturday and accidentally drove around the ring (with several people blindly following me). Their neutrino experiment, which was planned to shoot neutrinos to Minnesota (MINOS program), was on the imminent horizon and the staff were excited... apparently that was ended in 2016.

I guess it's a hard life being known for a particle accelerator when you get dethroned by CERN and then shut down your ring.

Neutrinos are pretty fascinating, it's true, but the price tag's pretty high. DOE could instead be financing solar PV research, battery research, etc... although then the politicians would likely cut their budget under pressure from the investor-owned utilities and fossil fuel exporters.

It's easy to criticize Fermilab for cost overruns and delays, but we must remember that they are pushing the boundaries of scientific knowledge and technology. The nature of cutting-edge research means that there will always be unknowns and challenges that cannot be anticipated.

>>Spending for the Superconducting Super Collider had become a target for a new class of congressmen elected in 1992. They were eager to show that they could cut what they saw as Texas pork, and they didn’t feel that much was at stake. The cold war was over, and discoveries at the SSC were not going to produce anything of immediate practical importance.

https://redsails.org/concessions/#education-and-research-its...

I guess what I'm trying to say is that the hacker mentality extends far beyond software. The hacker mentality is a way of life.

I wonder if they still do that summer program.

The building was empty but open, there's a museum upstairs but when we got lost between floors we would just walk between cubicles that were clearly in use during the week, it was super wierd and cool at the same time. We didn't see the accelerator of course but still, we saw some control rooms etc..., to this day I'm not sure if we broke in or what

Similar to your story, I got to take high school physics extra classes there, and it was awesome, like being in a Star Wars set with entirely normal parents who worked there and who could teach us really interesting physics (classical mostly, and relativity).

The Standard Model has some issues but it's, in principle, a valid effective description of all the fundamental forces minus gravity. The issue is that quantum effects of gravity are negligible until the Planck scale, we have no technological means to get even close to those levels. That is, physicists have been able to provide an understanding of the universe that for all we know for certain might be valid up to the Planck scale, which is where we know for sure new physics must appear. And because our technological ability is lagging much farther behind they must probe that new physics blindly, without any experimental evidence. This is an incredibly difficult thing to do.

Imagine that the ancient greeks managed to discover Quantum Mechanics. They lay down the correct Schrodinger equation, and understand the superposition principle, Heisenberg uncertainty principle, etc. They know it can potentially explain the atom but lacking sufficient engineering prowess they cannot really test the theory and verify its validity. This is the situation physics is in, we have mathematically consistent theories of quantum gravity but we cannot know if it's the correct description of the universe because experimental evidence is inaccessible and might be inaccessible for centuries to come.