Use of Models in Decision Making: A Policy Maker’s View

Abstract

I come to Brookhaven for the second time in my life. The first time was twenty-two years ago when, as a budget analyst, I came to look at a machine that I did not understand at all. It was called the Alternating Gradient Synchrotron, the Brookhaven AGS, a 30 billion electron volt proton accelerator which was being designed and built by a man named Lee Hayworth, if I remember correctly, who was the Director of the Laboratory and the godfather of that proton accelerator, and who later became the Director of the National Science Foundation. At that time I was a budget examiner for an organization called the Bureau of the Budget in the Federal Government of the United States. I was assigned to the Atomic Energy Program to review whether or not we should make, what we considered at that time, massive investments in basic research tools in the physical sciences.