Recently I received this brief memoir from David J. Ritchie, PhD Physics 1972. I hope that you enjoy reading it. Dr. Ritchie is now at Fermi Lab. http://www.svs.com/djr01/index.html …..Pat Viele, Physics & Astronomy Librarian

 

 

….In Fall 1966, I started as a graduate student in physics at Cornell University. I specialized in high energy physics. I eventually completed my dissertation (“Photoproduction of Eta Mesons at 4 and 8 GeV”), received my  Ph.D. in 1972 and went on to work at Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory (Fermilab) where I have been since.

 

During one winter (1967 – 1968, I think, or possibly a year later), I had a part time job on the Friday late evening shift (known as the “owl” shift) operating the 2 GeV electron synchrotron (which was in the basement of the Laboratory of Nuclear Studies building behind Clark Hall on the Cornell Campus).

 

As an up and coming high energy physics graduate student, I thought, of course, that I knew all about the 2 GeV synchrotron, which in those days very early in the computer era was controlled by an enormous wall of rotary knobs. Thinking back, there seems to have been a hundred.

 

The operator’s job was to adjust those knobs so as to maximize the beam of electrons that was being accelerated around a big donut shaped ring, eventually to the point where it would hit a target and scatter sub-atomic particles into experimental apparatus giving results of interest to the physics professor doing the experiment.

 

Generally, when I showed up to work the Friday “owl” shift, I would find everything working fine. The day shift professional synchrotron operator would have carefully adjusted those one hundred rotary knobs so as to maximize the amount of beam hitting the target.

 

Most of the time (fortunately), I would just try to leave everything alone with the hope that the beam would continue as it had been doing. However, on occasion, boredom and/or my graduate school education would get hold of me and I would try to change the knobs (this was called “tuning” the synchrotron) in order to increase the amount of beam hitting the target

 

As the owl shift went on, I would end up making some ten or fifteen well-meaning changes to the knobs. More often than not, the end result was that by the wee hours of the morning, I would have lost the beam entirely (i.e., there would be NO beam hitting the target) and in addition to no beam, I’d have the physics professor standing over me telling me to get the beam back.

 

At about this early hour, the next person on shift, an older, far more experienced, person than I, would show up.

 

As I remember, he would put down his papers, observe my plight, sit down at those one hundred knobs, tweak a few here and a few there, quickly get the beam back, maximized and on target as it was supposed to be.

 

That person’s name was John Gill. Knowing he was a poet, springing out of a number of experiences, such as the one I have described, and following questions from me like “How’d you do that?”, we would spend much time conversing about his concept versus mine of what was occurring on the other side of those knobs — a “man versus machine” discussion to be sure.

 

I learned that he had a very different mental image of what was going on than I. His was much more organic than mine which was an analytical physics view then not tempered by years of experience which I would hope now that I would see fit to apply.

 

I came to have a lot of respect for the success he had with his approach.

What’s more, once he got the synchrotron recovered from its graduate student induced mistuning, his success at operating the synchrotron resulted in the beam staying on target for hours at a time.

 

This meant that he could return to working on thosse papers that he always had with him when he showed up for shift.