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Policy and funding

Policy and funding

Shutdowns and start-ups

29 Jan 2015 Robert P Crease
Taken from the January 2015 issue of Physics World

What is the meaning of ceremonies that take place when major pieces of scientific equipment are shut down? Robert P Crease investigates

Photo of the last day of operations at the US National Synchrotron Light Source
Gone but not forgotten: The final day of operations at the US National Synchrotron Light Source. (Courtesy: Brookhaven National Laboratory)

“After 32 years of operation,” Steven Dierker announced, “the National Synchrotron Light Source (NSLS) will shut down for the final time this afternoon in just a few minutes.”

Dierker, the associate laboratory director for photon sciences at Brookhaven National Laboratory in the US, was speaking in a crowded NSLS control room on 30 September last year. By any measure, he continued, the NSLS had been one of the most productive scientific instruments ever, with more than 57,000 users, 17,000 publications and 7000 protein-crystal structures identified. Work at the lab also led to two Nobel prizes (in 2003 and 2009).

Dierker’s audience included lab administrators, machine operators, visitors and soon-to-be former users; a spillover crowd watched via a monitor. One person had flown from France for the event, while another had come from California. Most were wearing T-shirts that read: “Save the last photon for me”.

This long-planned event seemed perfectly natural. But why the fanfare over the end of a piece of equipment?

I asked several people, whose varied responses puzzled me. “It’s a funeral,” said one machine operator. “More like a divorce,” said another. An administrator said he felt pride. One user said it was like a graduation where everyone parties because they are moving on. Another reminisced about the past, saying an experiment at the NSLS “was like a road trip in college – you hang out with friends, eat junk food, listen to music and feel good about yourself”. Yet another user was angry: “Shutting it down’s a crime!” Everyone said that attending the ceremony was important, but gave a different reason why.

Celebration and cannibalism

Many aspects of science are clearly important: discovery, publishing and mentoring. Others, like shutdown ceremonies for scientific instruments, are also natural, routine and essential. Yet why are they harder to talk about?

The NSLS was not the first instrument, or even the first light source, to get a termination ceremony. When its contemporary, the Synchrotron Radiation Source (SRS) at the Daresbury Laboratory in Cheshire, UK, was shut down six years ago after 28 years, staff were given limited-edition commemorative medallions and gathered for what Ian Munro, who had steered the facility through its initial stages, called a “final photon party”.

Cannibalism tends to accompany shutdown rituals, and SRS parts had been promised to half a dozen other light sources, to museums and even to art – its dipole vessels were made into the Dipole Henge sculpture at Daresbury. As the end neared, Munro praised the “community village feel” at the SRS, saying its legacy lived on at the newer Diamond Light Source in Oxfordshire. Then he hit a red rf crash button, the overhead screen went blank and everyone toasted the machine. The ceremony was posted online.

The NSLS’s legacy also lives on, although closer to home, in the form of Brookhaven’s massive new $900m NSLS II, which will enter commission later this year and for which Dierker was the project director. NSLS II will produce X-rays that are 10?000 times brighter than its predecessor.

Yet the imminent start-up of NSLS II was not on the mind of Gary Weiner, an NSLS operator for almost 25 years, who was given close-out duty last September. “Attention all personnel,” he announced over the -public-address system. “NSLS shutdown will begin in 40 seconds. The last 40 seconds of light here at the National Synchrotron Light Source. I’ve been an operator here for 25 years. And I just want to say that it’s been an honour and privilege for me to work here, to do the work that we’ve done.” He quavered, before continuing: “And to work with all the great people that I’ve known here over the years. 20 seconds to go.” Weiner collected himself. Then: “Attention all personnel. X-ray and UV shutters will be disabled at this time. For the last time.”

The applause was warm and long. The control room crowd, however, was experienced enough to know that disabling the shutters was only the beginning of the death throes. Everyone stared at the beam monitors, watching silently as the beams ramped down to zero. This took several minutes. When Weiner finally announced, “That’s it!” the audience erupted in wild applause and whistles.

It didn’t take long for the cannibals to descend. A few minutes after the ceremony I noticed Dierker and Lisa Miller, another Brookhaven photon-sciences administrator, on the experimental floor, surveying equipment for delivery to NSLS II.

The critical point

We underestimate such ceremonies if we see them as simply expressing the sentimental feelings of administrators, operators and users about a tool they can no longer use. There’s more to such events. Nearly everyone I questioned mentioned two special things about the NSLS that made them think it is worth commemorating: the community it brought together and its role in their research. The way they spoke of the machine brought to mind “collective effervescence” – the French sociologist Emile Durkheim’s term for rituals in which different feelings bubble up in individuals as they celebrate sharing a way of life larger than they are.

Scientific shutdown ceremonies are different; the communities involved have been brought together by instruments, and are not really societies in Durkheim’s sense. Still, his term is apt. The NSLS made possible a unique way of life for those who worked at it, allowing them to become who they are and to do what they did. No wonder, then, the variety of descriptions I heard about what people were feeling – from divorces and funerals to graduations and road trips. What shutdown rituals really reveal, I think, is how little we understand the special character of scientific communities.

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