How Experiments End

Despite not-even-veiled threats by colleagues from PHENIX to bring a wooden stake to the next Experiment/Machine Meeting (just in case we really do ask for more data next year!), I really think this is it for PHOBOS.  One can see it in what may be our final logbook entry as a running experiment, written by my colleague Gerrit (who has been working on PHOBOS since 1994):

(06/08 12:18 G. Nieuwenhuizen & P. Steinberg) Switched off chiller.
Switched off cooling system through main key switch.
Switched off silicon air blower.
Disconnected powercords of all silicon FEC powersupplies.
Disconnected powercords of all silicon bias supplies.
Switched off TOF CAMAC crates.
Switched off trigger NIM bins and CAMAC crates on positive and negative side.
Switched off trigger Keithley scanning multimeters on positive and negative side.
Switched off PCal powersupplies on positive and negative side.
Switched off SpeCal powersupply, cosmic HV supplies and NIM bins.
-----------------------------------------------------------------
Last one to leave switches off the light.

This may be less apparently-eloquent than some of the meditations of Peter Galison (excellent historian of science, and the previous tenant of my first grad-school apartment...we used to get his mail) on "How Experiments End", but it's no less moving for those of us who've been involved with this project as long as we have.  Still, I like Galison's final words:

Thinking back over a long career of fieldwork, Claude Levi-Strauss paused to comment on the near-universal veneration of the sunset.  Why, he asked, should the sun's retirement command so much more interest than the geometrically similar sunrise?  Sunrises, according to the anthropologist, may suggest something of the weather to come.  But the sunset, refracted through the dest and droplets kicked up by all that has happened, recounts in compressed form the whole story of the day.  The end of an experiment resembles this sunset, recapitulating in a human context the encounter of reason with the world.

We'll see about this reason vs. world part, when we actually get our Quark Matter 2005 results ready by August for presentation in Budapest, Hungary!  Needless to say, since data analysis can continue for years, collaborations have a much longer afterlife than the duration of the data taking.

Comments

[Alejandro]

I really hope someone has backups of all these years of LEP data taking, for instance.