Some weeks, it just doesn’t pay to think about some topics. When I returned from Thanksgiving break on Monday morning, I did so only to find an alarming e-mail in my inbox. The e-mail, from a close colleague of mine, relayed the fact that our competitor experiment, Belle, had completed and printed a search for invisible decays of the Upsilon. What’s more, they did with one day’s worth of data what I was getting ready to finish using two years of data, and they did it over an order of magnitude better. The paper is at “http://www.arxiv.org/abs/hep-ex/0611041”:http://www.arxiv.org/abs/hep-ex/0611041.
I was pretty depressed. The root of this was a miscalculation on my part, a misjudgement of the value of running at the Upsilon(3S) energy rather than at the 4S, where I was doing my research. Getting scooped in science is a fact of life, albeit a crappy one. What’s more important is to never repeat the fundamental mistake again, and that I’ve managed to learn this past week. There are a couple of things left over on this topic however, things which I intend to develop quickly.
Getting to Friday was the most important of this week. I managed some successes in other projects, which took the bite off my Monday morning failure. This weekend was a chance to refresh before the Babar collaboration week starts on Tuesday. After I survive this week, I’ll thankfully be one step closer to the holidays and some actual refreshment in the company of family and friends. Last week was quite enough burnout for one month, I’ll tell you that.
