If you build it...
Monday, November 17, 2008
"If you build it, he will come." This was the famous quote broadcast into Ray Kinsella's head (Kevin Costner) in the movie Field of Dreams. The voice urged Ray to butcher up a section of his farm in Iowa to build a baseball field. Long story short, the guy builds the baseball field, goes through some rough times, plays some ball with some ghosts, one of whom turns out to be his father, and gets to finally release himself of some long held regrets he accumulated during his life. At least that’s the way I understood it.
Well, over here at LCLS it’s more like "If you build it, they will come." "It" in our case is not a baseball field but rather an X-ray laser and "they" are the scientists that will use the LCLS to make profound discoveries. However, we don’t have to make a blind leap of faith like Mr. Kinsella did in building his baseball field in the middle of nowhere (no offense to anyone from Iowa). We are building "it" and "they" are certain to come. I can promise you that because LCLS most certainly would not be funded if we didn't have scientists beating on our doors waiting for the LCLS to turn on. Our only regret may be that we don't have enough available beam time to satisfy everyone. Anyway, the key to the quote in either case is that you have to finish building "it." You can't play baseball on or partially built field, and you certainly can't do experiments with a partially built laser. I came to this realization, which when you think about it it's not much of a profound revelation, at the joint SSRL/LCLS Users' meeting held a few weeks ago. For those of you unfamiliar with such gatherings, users' meetings are annual events where management and staff of scientific user facilities present various topics (facility statistics, funding outlook, future upgrades and enhancements) to the user community. Additionally, there are sessions where users present their scientific research that they've accomplished using the facility. I was a bit disappointed at the overall attendance of this year's meeting, but I expect this will change for next year's meeting once the LCLS is operating. I'll let you know if my prediction is correct in a year! posted by David Fritz @ 10:30am
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