How did the universe begin?

Why is there more matter than antimatter?

What is the origin of electroweak symmetry breaking?

Will I find a parking space at the High Rise?

These are the fundamental questions that preoccupy the Fermilab community. Collider Run II at the Tevatron may help answer the first three. Director John Peoples aims to help answer the last, with a new parking plan that will go into effect on June 7, 1999.

The problem: People who work in the Wilson Hall "footprint" area fill all the close-in parking spaces when they arrive at work in the morning. Those who come to the High Rise later in the day for meetings or other business often can’t find a place to park within hailing distance.

The challenge: Accommodate the later arrivals without overly inconveniencing–and totally enraging–the early ones.

It hasn’t proved easy. Earlier plans setting aside close-in spaces for short-term parking drew such fire from some employees that the plans were reworked in response to suggested changes.

Fermilab managers considered a range of alternative solutions, some more practical than others. Astrophysicist Rocky Kolb, for example, proposed the introduction of valet parking at the Wilson Hall front door.

"The graduate students could do it," Kolb suggested. "It would be good training for them."

Other suggestions, including a decrease in the total number of short-term spaces, as well as an increase in all-day spaces in the east lot and opposite Ramsey Auditorium, have been incorporated in the current parking plan. The Laboratory has also paved additional parking areas.

"It is clear that no parking plan devised by man could satisfy everyone," Peoples said. "Even Divine Providence might have trouble. But we have done our best to balance the needs of all the people at Fermilab who use the High Rise."

Finding the origin of electroweak symmetry breaking might be easy, in comparison.