Inside Vancouver
The Time Machine - continued
By Bruce Grierson published Dec 1, 2008
It's been called the biggest scientific project ever. And Vancouver scientists are poised to help understand the origins of the universe.
Lockyer almost didn't become a scientist. One summer during his undergraduate years at York, he started talking seriously about a career as a provincial bureaucrat, but a physics and astronomy teacher named Bill Frisken took him aside and shook sense into him. (Lockyer had the mind of a particle physicist, Frisken said, one that could understand what made things tick at the smallest scale.) Nonetheless, that nonacademic part of his personality-an unapologetic eye for commercial opportunity-persists. It's these dimensions, one member of the hiring committee admits, that factored into his being hired last May. Right now what TRIUMF needs most is a communicator-a salesman, even. Because it's facing the sales job of its life.
On a rainy Wednesday in September, two weeks after the LHC thrummed to life in Geneva, Lockyer took the podium in the TRIUMF auditorium at UBC. He fumbled a little cordless mike onto his striped TRIUMF tie and looked out at a sea of sports coats. This was a peer-review committee assembled by the National Research Council, made up of scientists from some of the world's top facilities. Front and centre was the shaggy-maned Rolf-Dieter Heuer, the guy chairing the committee and the incoming director of CERN. All were here to hear TRIUMF toot its horn and plead its case. TRIUMF may be a big deal in Canada, but it is a modest nuclear facility by international standards. It would like to play with the big guys. To do so, it needs more money. Its directors are asking for $328 million, which amounts to a 50-percent increase over what it received in the last federal budget. A stamp of approval from this group doesn't guarantee that Parliament will find TRIUMF the money in February 2010, but a thumbs-down all but ensures that Lockyer will have more time to watch Phillies games.
