All-Hands meeting 11 a.m. Wednesday, Sept. 9

On Wednesday, Sept. 9, at 11 a.m., Director Pier Oddone will discuss the status of the laboratory and operational initiatives. All Fermilab employees are encouraged to attend.

Ned Goldwasser comes home to celebrate 90th birthday

Ned Goldwasser, Fermilab's founding deputy director, poses with Young-Kee Kim, Fermilab's current deputy director, during his 90th birhday celebration on Wednesday, Sept. 2.

For nearly 30 years, even after leaving the laboratory, Fermilab's founding deputy director Ned Goldwasser and founding director Robert Wilson celebrated their birthdays together.

They celebrated by fishing in the Florida Keys until Wilson had a stroke in 1996. Late last week, a visit to the laboratory allowed Goldwasser to relive those celebrations through Wilson's legacy.

"It really is always a pleasure to come back to Fermilab. My 10 or 11 years here were the most important of my professional life," Goldwasser said to employees gathered on the second floor crossover to wish him a happy 90th birthday. "The years I was here working with Bob Wilson are something I could never possibly forget."

After a rousing chorus of "Happy Birthday" and cake, employees and users crammed into One West to listen to Goldwasser give a special colloquium titled "Bob Wilson and the birth of Fermilab."

Ned Goldwasser presents on Bob Wilson and the birth of Fermilab.

The standing room-only crowd listened to Goldwasser describe Wilson's pioneering attitude, which made Fermilab possible on a shoe-string budget. He also talked about key people and events that shaped the future and the culture of the laboratory from the early days.

"Wilson said he could do that lab at a price that no one thought possible," Goldwasser said. "Without Bob, there wouldn't be a Fermilab today."

Current Fermilab Deputy Director Young-Kee Kim credited Goldwasser as well.

During his time at the laboratory, Goldwasser served on the site evaluation committee that recommended the Weston site to the U.S. Atomic Energy Commission for the construction of Fermilab. He worked on scheduling the experimental program and was involved with programs that implemented equal employment opportunities. Together with Wilson, he wrote the laboratory's original "Policy on Human Rights," issued in 1968.

Goldwasser left the laboratory in 1978 to return to the University of Illinois in Champaign as vice chancellor for research and dean of the graduate school.

Watch Goldwasser's colloquium presentation here.

-- Rhianna Wisniewski

Ned and Liza Goldwasser await for a ride outside Wilson Hall on Wednesday, Sept. 2. Image courtesy of Jackie Coleman. To see more of Coleman's photos of Goldwasser's lecture and birthday celebration, click here.

3.5 TeV : a good start!

From CERN Bulletin, Sept. 7, 2009

To the pessimists out there, the 3.5 TeV starting energy of the LHC will be like a half-empty glass. However, the thousands of physicists working at the experiments certainly do not share these feelings. On the contrary, they are as excited as ever since they will be the first to observe what happens to matter in these (still) unprecedented conditions.

Although one might think that 3.5 TeV for a machine designed to operate beams at 7 TeV is as frustrating as driving a Ferrari when the speed limit is 60 km/h, physicists working at the LHC experiments see the glass half full: they are now focusing on how to make the best use of this intermediate energy. For them, having the opportunity to test their detectors at non-extreme conditions is rather a reassuring feeling. "So far, the CMS detector has been commissioned using cosmic rays. After start-up, the first thing CMS will do is to check its performance again, this time with collision data - where the particles originate from the centre of the detector rather than passing from the top to the bottom as is the case with cosmic rays", explains Jim Virdee, CMS Spokesperson.

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