When the final federal science budget for fiscal year 2006 was passed by the US Congress in December, a cut of more than 8% in the nuclear physics budget at the Department of Energy had immediate and severe consequences for Brookhaven National Laboratory (BNL) director Praveen Chaudhari. He had a billion-dollar machine, the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider, and not nearly enough money to operate it. Chaudhari announced that RHIC’s planned polarized-proton run for 2006 would be canceled and about 100 employees laid off (see Physics Today, January 2006, page 28).
Then came the phone call from Jim Simons, a PhD mathematician who, after teaching at the University of California, Berkeley, and Harvard University, founded an investment company in the early 1970s and became a billionaire. Simons, who also chaired the mathematics department at Stony Brook University and is on the BNL board, was concerned about the RHIC shutdown....
