University of Chicago astrophysicist Michael Turner was hustling through the Washington, DC, power structure in mid-April with the fervor of a lobbyist with a hot issue. As the driving force behind the just-released National Research Council report Connecting Quarks with the Cosmos: Eleven Science Questions for the New Century, Turner had the critical task of championing the study. After more than two years of overseeing the writing of the report, Turner was charged with convincing the Washington officials who control the federal science purse strings that the study was worth supporting.
The report, an assessment of science at the “intersection of astronomy and physics,” offers seven recommendations that form a strategy for achieving specific scientific objectives through coordinated planning involving NASA, NSF, the Department of Energy, and the physics and astronomy communities. The first three recommendations—measuring the polarization of the cosmic microwave background to detect the signature of inflation,...
