Fermilab sits on 6,800 acres outside Batavia, Illinois, about 34 miles west of downtown Chicago. The land was not empty when the government came looking. Weston, Illinois, was a small community next to Batavia whose village board voted the town out of existence in 1966 to make way for the new National Accelerator Laboratory. The lab was formally founded in 1969 and renamed in 1974 in honor of Enrico Fermi, the Italian-born physicist who had produced the first controlled nuclear chain reaction at the University of Chicago in 1942. Wilson opened the facility ahead of schedule and under budget, a feat so remarkable in the world of government-funded Big Science that it became part of laboratory lore. He then resigned in 1978 to protest what he considered insufficient federal funding for particle physics research.

Wilson was a physicist, but also a sculptor and self-taught architect, and he refused to let Fermilab look like a cluster of concrete bunkers. The laboratory's 16-story headquarters, Wilson Hall, was inspired by the soaring nave of St. Pierre's Cathedral in Beauvais, France, rendered in Brutalist concrete. Its twin towers and narrow profile are visible for miles across the flat prairie. Inside, a double-helix staircase spirals up through the atrium. Across the campus, Wilson installed sculptures fashioned from recycled accelerator parts: Tractricious, an arrangement of steel tubes near the Industrial Complex, and the soaring Broken Symmetry at the Pine Street entrance. The high-voltage power lines that cross the property are shaped like the Greek letter pi. Pumping stations follow the curve of Archimedean spirals. A Mobius strip crowns the Ramsey Auditorium. Even the infrastructure is an expression of the mathematics the laboratory investigates.

Fermilab's original workhorse was the Tevatron, a ring 3.9 miles in circumference that, until the Large Hadron Collider started up near Geneva in 2008, was the most powerful particle accelerator on Earth. The Tevatron collided protons and antiprotons at energies up to 1.96 trillion electron volts, and its crowning achievement was the 1995 discovery of the top quark, the heaviest known elementary particle. The lab also discovered the bottom quark in 1977 and the tau neutrino in 2000. The Tevatron was shut down in 2011, but Fermilab's accelerator complex continues to operate. The Main Injector, a ring two miles in circumference, accelerates protons to 120 billion electron volts and feeds them to a suite of experiments. A new superconducting linear accelerator, PIP-II, began construction in 2020, with a projected cost of roughly $1.3 billion including international contributions.

Fermilab's future centers on neutrinos, the ghostly particles that pass through ordinary matter almost without interacting. The lab is building the Deep Underground Neutrino Experiment, or DUNE, which will fire the world's most intense neutrino beam from Batavia to a massive liquid-argon detector 800 miles away in a former gold mine in Lead, South Dakota. The measurements could reveal why the universe contains more matter than antimatter. Meanwhile, the Muon g-2 experiment has been generating headlines since 2021, when initial results suggested that muons do not behave as the Standard Model predicts, potentially pointing to undiscovered forces or particles. The 50-foot superconducting magnet at the heart of that experiment was transported in one piece from Brookhaven National Laboratory on Long Island, traveling 3,200 miles over 35 days by barge down the East Coast and up the Mississippi River.

Above the accelerator tunnels, Fermilab maintains one of the largest tallgrass prairie restorations in the state. Beginning in 1975, the Fermilab Prairie Committee began converting fallow agricultural land back to native grasses. By 2000, twenty-five plantings covered nearly 1,000 acres, creating habitat for bobolinks, meadowlarks, and dozens of other grassland species. The bison herd, which today numbers around 30 animals, grazes an 800-acre pasture alongside the prairie. American barn owls nest in structures around the grounds, introduced in partnership with the Forest Preserve District of DuPage County. A Christmas Bird Count has been held at the lab every year since 1976. Some locals once suspected the bison served as radiation canaries, a rumor Fermilab has firmly denied. The animals are there because Wilson believed a laboratory at the frontier of physics should also be a place worth visiting, a patch of restored prairie where the oldest American ungulate roams above tunnels searching for the newest particles.