[Flavius]

Fermilab Director Piermaria Oddone spoke of the gift stating, "This is very unusual. It's not a building that carries a name. It's really a commitment to science and the nation and in particular to particle physics as a long-range important undertaking for our nation."

we dont need that junk we have this now its more important

[Coyoteman]

The U.S. government may be forced to reevaluate its spending priorities as more experimental physics labs and other science programs go under and U.S. leadership in the sciences slips.

This should make the anti-science crowd here very happy.

I'm sure we'll all enjoy the coming Dark Age.

[DaGman]

Once this money runs out and this lab is gone the United States will be on the same level as Mexico, Guatamala, Honduras, Costa Rica and probably all of Africa when it comes to particle physics.

The US is well on it’s way to being a third world country.

[Travis McGee]

Remember when the USA used to lead the world in physics research?

[El Gato]

various items such as war funding taking precedence in government budgets,

Such as "entitlements". The military budget, even with the war funding, is still not all that high by post WW-II standards. Of course the NASA and other science budgets are in the crapper. Even "small limited government" Thomas Jefferson saw the need for "exploration", in his case that meant sending Lewis & Clark out on their mission of discover, today it means pushing the envelope in all the natural sciences, not just the ones that are seen as immediately useful.

Those should mostly be funded by the industries and individuals who stand to benefit. It's the "we don't know what it might good for stuff", like quantum mechanics that later led to masers and lasers (once called a solution looking for a problem), as well as all the solid state electronics goodies we enjoy or curse today, that should be funded by governments and philanthropists.

[kingu]

Wouldn’t mind hearing what these salaries were that were slashed.. Considering the librarians at the local African American Cultural Center pull down $125k of public dough.

[denydenydeny]

This is infuriating because the federal government always manages to find money to fund bike paths or National Twine Museums but never has money for the important strategic things.

[Varda]

I guess now is not the time to pick up that physics PhD. I don’t see how private donors can keep physics research alive.

[ConservativeMind]

All of you winers, complaining that the government should do all these things seem so willing to spend other people’s money for the world’s public good.

What’s wrong with you and others, privately, sending money to fund such work? Someone did just that, and look at what will come out of it. Apparently something good, but at an individual’s expense.

Welfare whores!

What’s wrong with freeing private enterprise to go fund such work?

You’d think, from the way you all speak, that Ben Franklin couldn’t have invented great things for his time without a huge government grant.

Get real

[Grammy]

ping

[SuziQ]

Fermi Lab ping!

[wastedyears]

Well there’s the chance that during an experiment, a little black hole opens up and sucks the Earth in.

I’m not at all anti-science. I loved it as a student. I’m just a little uncertain about experiments designed to figure out the Big Bang and how our universe happened, and where it’s going in the (very, very, very distant) future.

[Erasmus]

By the way, this organization has its headquarters on the Fermilab campus:

[PeterPrinciple]

due to the growing economic crisis and various items such as war funding taking precedence in government budgets,

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war funding was not the problem, it was all the social and political funding for global warming..............