Energy Secretary Steven Chu is adjusting to a new role. He visited a house that had received fuel-saving cold-weather insulation.

By JOHN M.BRODER


WASHINGTON - As a physicist, Steven Chu has seen atoms suspended in a powerful laser beam and DNA stretched out in a vacuum chamber.

But in his new job as energy secretary, he is observing phenomena he never saw in the science laboratory.

For a slight, soft-spoken Nobel laureate, Washington has been an initiation that he has likened to being “dumped in the deep end of the pool.”

Dr.Chu, 61, ran a national research laboratory and was chairman of the physics department at Stanford University in California. As energy secretary he has been forced to backtrack on ill-informed comments about the Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries and ordered to spend quickly tens of billions of dollars in economic stimulus money with virtually no toplevel help.

Dr.Chu is still mastering skills like ducking a tough question from a reporter and delivering the all-purpose“I’ll get back to you on that.”

He has admitted his naivete on certain policy questions, like OPEC production quotas, and is still getting used to the scrutiny that comes with a cabinet job.

“I didn’t appreciate how much of a public figure you become,”Dr.Chu said in an interview recently in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, where he talked to scientists about biofuels and toured a home that was being insulated against cold weather under a local program.

President Obama has assigned Dr.Chu to carry out some of his central priorities: wean America from dependence on fossil fuels, rebuild the nation’s electrical grid and address the challenges of climate change.

The science part of his job is the most rewarding, he said. Asked what part he liked the least, he said: “The fact that I’m constantly being told that I have to be careful what I say to the press and in public. I can’t speculate out loud anymore. Everything I say is taken with total seriousness.”

Yet as he takes on one of the toughest challenges in government, Dr.Chu brings assets that none of his peers or predecessors have had: a Nobel Prize, a YouTube following (for his lectures on climate change) and an unofficial theme song (“Dr.Wu” by Steely Dan). He is a celebrity in Taiwan, where scientific achievement is prized.

Dr.Chu is struggling to get a grasp on one of the most perplexing and intractable bureaucracies in Washington and to efficiently - and carefully - disperse $39 billion in funding from the stimulus package. Most of the department’s top appointed positions, including deputy secretary, remain unfilled, leaving him largely reliant on career staff members to manage 114,000 employees and contractors. Some in Washington quietly wonder if Dr.Chu is in over his head.

Dan Leistikow, the Energy Department’s director of public affairs, noted that Dr.Chu was a scientist, not a politician, and said he should be given time to adjust.“A Nobel scientist is more likely to figure out Washington than a career politician is to figure out how to deal with carbon sequestration,” Mr.Leistikow said.

Dr.Chu came to Washington after serving as director of the Energy Department’s Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory in California, a civilian research organization with 4,000 employees. Before that, he was a professor and research scientist at Stanford and Bell Laboratories. He shared the 1997 Nobel in physics for his work on cooling and trapping atoms with laser light.

He comes from a family of academic overachievers. His father emigrated from China to study chemical engineering at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and retired as a professor at the Polytechnic Institute of Brooklyn. His mother studied economics in China and at M.I.T.

Dr.Chu said he had been frustrated by the job vacancies and the glacial pace of action in his department. Borrowing an analogy from the world of physics, he said that in Washington, Newton’s first law - a body in motion tends to stay in motion - does not apply.“In a bureaucracy, if you start something in motion, it either stops or gets derailed,”he said.“You have to keep applying force.”