Remarks
by Dr. Raymond L. Orbach
Director, Office of Science
U.S. Department of Energy
It is a great privilege
for me to speak with you this evening, celebrating
“Engage in Physics at the Frontiers
of Science.” You have visited the frontiers
during these past two days. I hope you have
found them exciting and energizing.
For all of us
who have been so fortunate as to have had
a full career in science, the thrill of discovery
is what keeps us going. As you already know,
science is hard. A professional life is one
of frustration, disappointment, and plain
hard work. In my own case, it seemed that
I "got it right” only after I had
made what felt like “every mistake possible.”
But getting it right made it all worthwhile.
What other field can give the satisfaction
of knowing that you have made a contribution
to mankind that no one can take away? You
have created new knowledge, adding to the
intellectual wealth of civilization. That
is what scientific research is all about.
And it is rewarding to be a part of it.
For the most part,
you are undergraduates majoring in physics,
chemistry, mathematics, or the other fields
which are contained within the physical sciences.
All of these fields are difficult, as the
easy problems have all been solved. The hard
ones remain, but all the more satisfaction
if you can solve them. You need to stay with
your major, delving into as much mathematics
as you can fit in to your schedule. The quantitative
nature of science, and the ability to determine
what is right from experiment, sets it apart
from other academic fields.
Argonne National
Laboratory is renowned for the breadth and
depth of its expertise, in fields as disparate
as physics, mathematics, chemistry, biology,
materials science, applied mathematics, and
computation. Tomorrow, you will visit one
of the great universities of the world, and
will meet others who also have made singular
discoveries. These three days are an immersion
into the depths of scientific exploration
and discovery. We all hope you will be sufficiently
excited to continue your studies, even in
the face of difficulties we all have growing
up: economic difficulty, hard courses, and
family issues. Your efforts now are an investment
for the future. I hope you will persevere.
Science is hard, but the payoffs are phenomenal.
My Office is within
the U.S. Department of Energy. I am the Director
of the Office of Science, responsible for
ten national laboratories which themselves
serve as hosts to 19,000 scientists and engineers
from this country and abroad who use their
unique facilities. In addition, we support
about 23,500 students, postdocs, and faculty
throughout our nation through grants and contracts.
The Office of Science is the chief supporter
of basic research in the physical sciences
in the United States. We are the sole, and
primary, supporter of fields as disparate
as catalysis, high energy and nuclear physics,
materials science, and chemistry. Our budget
is around $3.6 billion, making us the third
largest support of basic research in the United
States, behind the National Institutes of
Health and the National Science Foundation.
As the principal
supporter of the physical sciences, we take
our mission very seriously. For we determine,
through our funding decisions, which fields
and sub-fields will prosper, and which will
not. It is an awesome responsibility. To assure
that we make wise choices, we seek the advice
of the scientific community through advisory
boards and panels. It is likely that some
of your teachers and their colleagues provide
the advice and direction which informs our
decisions, and enables us to make decisions
in the best interest of science and our nation.
We work closely with other U.S. government
agencies. In high energy physics, nuclear
physics, and astronomy and cosmology, we team
with the National Science Foundation and the
National Aeronautics and Space Administration
to seek advice from peers at universities,
state and federal agencies, and laboratories
such as this one. It is a complex framework,
but one which has kept the U.S. ahead of every
other country in scientific research since
World War II.
Why is this important?
First, there is the intellectual contribution
that search and discovery provides. It fuels
other disciplines as well, but its primary
benefit is to excite and enable our society
to understand the world in which we live,
and to change it for the better. Second, we
live a better, more prosperous life, because
of science. Over half of the economic growth
of the U.S. since World War II can be traced
to scientific discovery.
What are we doing
to continue the scientific leadership of our
country? As I said before, our responsibility
is to allow our scientists and engineers to
do the best, most productive and exciting
science. We live in a global society, and
competition abounds in countries everywhere.
We have no corner in this market. To continue
leadership means we must provide our scientists
the best and most supportive atmosphere in
which to work.
How do we do that?
You have in your hand one example of leadership
from the Office of Science: the booklet “Facilities
for the Future of Science: A Twenty-Year Outlook.”
It was presented to the nation by our previous
Secretary of Energy, Spencer Abraham, on November
10, 2003, a little more than a year ago, in
a major address at the National Press Club
to over 300 in the audience, and to the rest
of the nation through C-SPAN. I hope you will
take time to thumb through this document,
for it is the most ambitious formulation for
the future of science ever undertaken by any
government. It describes the facilities for
the future that will enable scientists to
probe the secrets of nature. It gives each
of you a picture of your future, almost independent
of whatever field you are planning to pursue.
You can pick and choose wherever you feel
your future lies, for your future is contained
here, in this booklet.
There is more.
This is not just a listing of all possible
future facilities which will enable the best
science. It only lists 28 facilities. And
the facilities are prioritized according to
the best science they will produce. In fact,
their order is like a golf score: there is
a first, and there is a second. But there
are four facilities tied for third for the
simple reason that their relative order is
difficult if not impossible to obtain on purely
scientific grounds. These choices were made
with the assistance of the U.S. scientific
community. Our Advisory Panels assessed the
scientific opportunities in their own fields,
and set timelines when these opportunities
could mature. My Office then chose between
fields, assigning priority according to our
best sense of relative scientific importance
using, of course, the assessments of our Advisory
Panels.
And what did we
decide?
The highest priority
went to the International Thermonuclear Experimental
Reactor or ITER for short. A fusion energy
experiment, ITER offers an opportunity to
solve our energy supply without environmental
emissions problems.
In the next 20
years, world demand for electricity will grow
by 50%. The energy appetite of the world will
double by the end of this century. Where will
that energy come from? The most optimistic
estimate is that 17% can come from renewable
sources. What about the other 83%? We can
continue to expand our use of fossil fuels:
oil, gas, coal. But there are consequences,
not least of which is an increase in which
we call “greenhouse gases.” In
particular, CO2 concentrations are already
reaching near double their historical value.
And they continue to rise. In order to stem
that increase, at what scientists currently
feel is a “reasonable” level,
fully 40% of the energy required by this planet
at the end of this century must be greenhouse
gas free. Or, roughly, a source must be found
that could produce the current total energy
consumption of the earth, and yet remain environmentally
benign.
From my perspective,
this is fusion, the process that powers the
sun. To create the temperatures and pressures
here on earth required for fusion at the center
of the sun is challenging. ITER is a superconducting
“tokamak” capable of generating
up to four times the power it consumes by
fusing deuterium and tritium into helium and
a neutron. The energy of the reaction is carried
by the neutron to a “blanket”
which heats a fluid sufficiently to drive
a steam turbine. This creates electricity
with no environmental insult. The only thing
coming out of the tailpipe is helium, which
escapes into the atmosphere, and ultimately
leaves the earth because of the relatively
weak force of gravity.
Following ITER,
a demonstration power plant, based on fusion
energy, promises unlimited energy for the
world, with no environmental insult. You can
be part of this dream if you enter into the
field of fusion energy science.
Next on the list
is UltraScale Scientific Computing Capability.
We are learning how to construct computers
of great speed and storage capacity. But our
architectures today are inefficient, leading
to use of that speed at only the 14% level.
The Japanese, through their “Earth Simulator”
computer taught us in 2002 that computer architectures
could be developed that would operate with
66% efficiency. While the net (sustained)
speed was “only” 26.5 Teraflops
for geoscience problems, larger more modern
designs should be able to reach sustained
speeds of 50 to 100 Teraflops, sufficient
to achieve scientific discovery. Problems
from combustion to supernova collapse to fusion
simulations should all yield to these speeds,
not to mention protein folding and similar
biological science opportunities. Indeed,
simulation through computation can become
the third leg of scientific discovery, after
experiment and theory. And you can become
a part of that opportunity.
Argonne National
Laboratory specializes in high end computation
software, and is teaming with Oak Ridge National
Laboratory to produce the Leadership Class
Computer, architecture with efficiencies in
excess of 50%. “End Stations”
are being designed that will enable researchers
with common computational needs to match their
programs to the full power of the Leadership
Class Computer at a distance, bringing scientific
discovery to every locale.
But the opportunities
do not stop there. Industry’s competitiveness
requires leadership in design, in production
efficiency, in bringing products to market
before their competitors. The concept of “virtual
prototype” finds a home in the Leadership
Class Computer. From quieter cars, to more
efficient jet engines, to even diapers: simulation
through high end computation can give our
industry a head start, continuing U.S. dominance
in manufacturing in the face of fierce international
competition.
The next four
scientific projects are tied for third because
the differences in scientific opportunities
between them are too small for a sensible
ordering of priority. They provide new platforms
for discovery in four disparate fields: high
energy physics, basic energy sciences, biological
and environmental research, and nuclear physics.
These facilities open the future of these
fields, and again you can be a part of these
opportunities.
In alphabetical
order, the first of those tied for third is
the Joint Dark Energy Mission (JDEM). Dark
energy was only discovered in 1998, and now
is thought to account for nearly three-quarters
of the energy budget of the universe. This
energy is associated with the acceleration
of the expansion of the universe, and can
be represented by the “cosmological
constant” within Einstein’s General
Relativity formula. It is opposite in sign
to Einstein’s original insertion. He
used the constant to keep the size of the
universe fixed, before we knew of the universe’s
expansion. A constant expansion rate would
set the constant to zero. An ever increasing
expansion rate requires a negative value,
or something equivalent to “antigravity.”
No one knows the origin of dark energy, so
we have much to learn from experiment.
How to measure
the expansion of the universe? Type 1a supernovas
are thought to be “standard candles”
for which the red shift can give us their
speed, and their brightness their distance.
But to measure the large number of sources
which can generate further insight requires
a telescope in space, a supernova acceleration
probe. JDEM is a telescope, with a billion
radiation-hardened pixels, to be flown in
space in partnership with NASA. The average
digital camera has three million pixels, or
sensing devices: JDEM has more than three
hundred times their capacity. The telescope
is currently under construction.
At stake is an
understanding of the nature of most of the
energy budget of the universe. Is there a
relationship between dark energy of now, and
the force that produced “inflation”
of the early universe? Will the universe continue
to accelerate until each and every atom in
the universe is literally pulled apart by
this force and broken into its constituent
parts? The origin and nature of dark energy
represents to many the most important question
in cosmology today. You can be a part of the
effort to determine the answer.
Next of the four
facilities tied for third is the Linac Coherent
Light Source (LCLS). This remarkable device
is a free electron laser being built at the
Stanford Linear Accelerator Center (SLAC),
utilizing the linear accelerator (linac) which
was built for high energy physics. This injector
propels electrons at near the speed of light
through an undulator (not unlike a washboard)
which generates coherent light in the hard
X-ray region, with wavelengths of the order
of an angstrom. Not only is the intensity
high, some ten billion times brighter than
any known source on earth today, but it comes
in packets shorter in time that than the time
it takes to form a chemical bond. The conjunction
of very short wavelength and time leads to
a whole new field: ultra-fast science.
Chemical reactions
will be “frozen in time” much
the same way that dancers are frozen in position
with stroboscopic light. The nature of chemical
bond formation will be elucidated, along with
ways in which to control reaction pathways.
No one knows the opportunities which may be
opened by such short time scales. In addition,
the ultra-high intensity, and the coherence
of the X-ray beam, will enable structure determination
of single macromolecules. This will free the
biology community from having to grow single
crystals for structural determination. Many
proteins to not crystallize (e.g. cell wall
proteins), so their structures are not measurable
using current devices. This will all change
with the advent of the LCLS. Whether chemistry,
biology, or material science is your field,
this new machine will open opportunities for
you not available anywhere else on earth.
The next facility
tied for third is the Protein Production and
Tags. This “factory” will produce
proteins “tagged” so their position
can be visualized. At present, many laboratories
spend countless hours synthesizing proteins
of interest in very small quantities. The
factory will develop highly automated processes
to mass-produce and characterize proteins
directly from microbial genome data and create
affinity reagents (chemical “tags”)
to identify, capture, and monitor the proteins
from living systems. Given that a microbe
makes several thousand proteins, and thousands
of microbes need to be studied, researchers
need the ability to produce and characterize
tens of thousands of proteins and nearly one
hundred thousand “tags” per year.
This facility will free researchers from this
tedious task.
Not only will
quantities be large, but the variety of proteins
produced be great. The combination will open
up the prospects for visualization of protein
function and behavior. This “imaging”
will enable scientists to track the steps
from protein synthesis within the cell to
their functions which enable the cell to live.
If modern biology is your interest, this facility
will prove essential to your research.
The final facility
tied for third is the Rare Isotope Accelerator
(RIA). The nuclear processes within stars
that produced the heavy elements of which
we are made were a consequence of a chain
of nuclear synthesis reactions. This chain
involved nuclei that lived for unimaginably
short times -- so short that we have been
unable to observe them in our laboratories
on earth. As a result, we do not know the
life times and interaction cross sections
for these rare isotopes. The ones we do know
are the stable isotopes. RIA will produce
the ones we do not know.
RIA will allow us to explore the structure
and forces that make up the nucleus of atoms;
learn how the chemical elements that make
up the world around us were created; test
current theories about the fundamental structure
of matter, and play a role in developing new
nuclear medicines and techniques. If creation
of the interstellar dust, of which we are
made, is of interest to you, RIA will open
the opportunity for discovery.
I have only touched
on six of the twenty eight facilities that
will provide a future for science and a future
for you. Scientists around the world are smart,
just as smart as we are. But the reason why
the U.S. is pre-eminent in science is in part
because our scientists have the best facilities
with which to work. The Office of Science
wants you to become a part of that pre-eminence.
To help you, we offer a number of opportunities.
The Office of Science offers paid internships
in science and engineering at many Department
of Energy laboratories.
One that may be
most interesting to you is called “Science
Undergraduate Laboratory Internship”
or SULI. The little booklet which you have
describes it in detail. You can become part
of the intense interdisciplinary research
environment of a national laboratory, and
you establish a long term research relationship
with national laboratory scientists and engineers.
E-mail us at the addresses on the back of
the brochure should you be interested, or
visit our web site also listed on the back
of the brochure.
Through these
internships, you can be a part of the discovery
process. You can contribute to the knowledge
base of our world. And you can develop your
own skills and excitement for science that
will enable you to join with the rest of us
as we probe the secrets of nature. There is
nothing less at stake: scientific discovery
is intellectually challenging and rewarding,
and we want you to be part of it.
Thank you
and good luck.
