This coming week is a BaBar Collaboration meeting, the first one since last fall when we celebrated the life of the B-factory with a one-day symposium. This is a chance to think ahead in the short-term about the winter conferences – just around the corner! – and to look to the priorities for the summer.
Collaborations in my field, as I have mentioned many times before, think in terms of islands of activity around high-profile conferences. It amps up the effort and gets the thoughts focused on a tangible goal, but always with the cautionary finger wag that preliminary results for a conference must make the transition, through the chrysalis of refinement and review, into the butterfly of a journal publication. After all, it’s peer reviewed and vetted results that matter, not generally accurate but highly sexy results.
It’s also a chance to see those far-flung collaborators who once called SLAC their research home, but who are now occupied with the necessary business of life beyond BaBar. BaBar has trained so many excellent scientists, who benefitted from a beautiful accelerator and a solid detector, and sent them far and wide into the field. I see in many of my colleagues, matured by a life on BaBar, the general qualities of adaptibility, ingenuity, and scrutiny needed to make lifelong contributions to the field in any experiment they choose.
But like all those cousins who have gone to seek their fortunes, it’s nice to have them home for a short visit.
