Arie Bodek of the University of Rochester won the prestigious 2004 Panofsky Prize in experimental physics "for his broad, sustained, and insightful contributions to elucidating the structure of the nucleon, using a wide variety of probes, tools and methods at many laboratories" including Fermilab.

Mark Strovink of Lawrence Berkeley Lab was a prominent member of Fermilab muon experiment E26 from 1970 to 1974, an original observer of the "scaling patterns" predicted by QCD. Fermilab theorist Bill Bardeen was among those who "established the standard framework for describing the data," as cited by colleague Chris Quigg.

Keith Ellis, former Head of Theoretical Physics, co-authored "QCD and Collider Physics" in 1996 with Bryan Webber of Cavendish Laboratory, University of Cambridge, and James Stirling, University of Durham. The book is both a graduate-level textbook and a standard reference across particle physics (and still available for $48).

"Gross, Politzer and Wilczek began to lay out how QCD could be turned into real calculational structure," Ellis said. "Now it's used all time at the Tevatron to calculate rates of signals, and rates of backgrounds. The theory of strong interactions was floundering before they made their discovery."

The 2004 Nobel citation is "for the discovery of asymptotic freedom in the theory of the strong interaction." In the simplest terms, Gross, Polizter and Wilczek reached the counter-intuitive realization that the strong force actually increases with distance, the opposite of other forces. Thus, the harder we try to pull quarks apart, the tighter the strong force binds them. The strong force ebbs only at small distances, such as those within the proton.

"Asymptotic freedom is the first manifestation for QCD, so we might as well say the prize is for QCD," said Bodek, who has hunted many of the same trails for the last 30 years.

His electron-scattering experiments at SLAC showed hints of the necessary "scaling violations," but Bodek said he didn't find wide acceptance until moving to higher-energy experiments with muons and neutrinos at Fermilab.

"At much higher energies, we saw the scaling violations, and that confirmed the concept," Bodek said. "Then QCD became more accepted. At that point, we understood that the proton was made of quarks."

Bardeen, with colleagues Andrzej Buras, Taizo Muta and Denis Duke, made it possible for researchers to apply to theory to the complex environment of experiments at the Tevatron and other particle colliders.

"We had to see whether this theory was actually the one that Nature was using," said Bardeen, who was visiting the Kavli Institute for Theoretical Physics in Santa Barbara, Calif., home base for Gross, when the Nobel announcement was made.

"We needed to have experimental tests with great precision, which was very difficult initially," Bardeen continued. "What we did was to systematize the calculations in what is called 'perturbative QCD,' so you could use perturbative theory at high energies. We came up with a rule book, and we made it available to everyone to use experimentally."

Bardeen said that when the Nobel annoucement was made, Gross told those at the Kavli Institute that "it was the work of literally hundreds of people, both experimenters and theorists, who demonstrated that QCD is, in fact, the theory of the strong interaction."

One of the papers listed in the Nobel citation was a Fermilab publication submitted with Wilczek in July 1973 while Gross was visiting Fermilab (which at the time was still called the National Accelerator Laboratory). The paper was subsequently published in Physical Review D.

Having the Nobel awarded for work accomplished 30 years in the past is not unusual; Leon Lederman, for example, shared a 1988 Nobel for work done in 1960. As Ellis pointed out, the time lag is a reminder that science is not the field for instant results.

"It is important to note that this work was done 30 years ago, which means we have to make investments now for 30 years hence," he said. "This is the reason that funding for sciences should be beefed up."