Ray Orbach

"The management and operating contract does not absolve the Office of Science from responsibility," Orbach said. "Your targets are ours, and it is critical that they be met. If there is a problem, it is a problem for all of us, not just for you. When we promise an accomplishment, we do it. I can't impress enough on you the importance of credibility. The responsibility is on you and on us to achieve the milestones that we set. This is not to interfere with the science that we do-just the opposite. It is what we need to do to achieve the science. We are in this together."

He commended the work going on at Fermilab. "NuMI is on track and MINOS is ahead of schedule. The work for the LHC is going well."

It is possible, Orbach told the HEPAP panel, that "this century will be even more exciting than the last for the physical sciences. The discovery of dark energy tells us that so much is unknown. As experiments like those at Fermilab take us further back in time, we don't know what we will find."

From The New York Times July 29, 2003
Astronomers Chart the Unseen Between the Stars
By Dennis Overbye

Once restricted to looking at the pearly lights of stars, astronomers have increasingly sought to look for what they cannot see in the darkness between the stars.
read more

From The New Yorker
July 28, 2003
Strung Out
By Woody Allen

Woody Allen

I am greatly relieved that the universe is finally explainable. I was beginning to think it was me. As it turns out, physics, like a grating relative, has all the answers. The big bang, black holes, and the primordial soup turn up every Tuesday in the Science section of the Times, and as a result my grasp of general relativity and quantum mechanics now equals Einstein's - Einstein Moomjy, that is, the rug seller. How could I not have known that there are little things the size of "Planck length" in the universe, which are a millionth of a billionth of a billionth of a billionth of a centimetre? Imagine if you dropped one in a dark theatre how hard it would be to find.
Sadly the rest of this article is not available online. To read more pick up the New Yorker or stop by the Office of Public Affairs. The article is posted on the bulletin board.