On Tue, Jan 10, 2023 at 6:52 PM Konstantin Olchanski <[log in to unmask]> wrote:
>
> Keith, thanks. In practice, experiment data is not "perpetual",
> life time of typical physics experiment is about 5-10 years after
> the last data taking. Afterwards, people tend to dissipate (retire,
> graduate and move on, just move on, lose interest, join different
> project, etc). after the last person who was involved with
> the experiment is "gone", experiment data is "orphaned" and
> nothing much can be done with it, even if the physical media
> and the data format is still readable and if the analysis
> software still can be compiled and still runs.

I can vouch for the difficulty of access to old data, and of
preserving data from unique experiments.  Updates and recoveries of
old data have paid quite a bit of my wages, for years.

And getting data out of people's proprietized setups, with their own
internalized databases? And especially the CTO devised custom source
control systems? And data stored on media that can no longer be read?
I helped an astronomer friend recover data about a unique occultation
of Pluto from mag tape that he could not find a reader for *anywhere*
at MIT or Harvard: my friends in the lab next door still had one, and
we used to recover data before it was decommissioned. And I remember
transferring human experimental data to Exabyte, *and* CD, to make
sure it would be recoverable for a dozen more years because you can't
necessarily repeat data involving human nerves.

> That said, CERN support the "open data" approach, where general public
> has access to experiment data. But not to raw data, without calibrations
> and interpretations, raw data is dangerous, john q. public can easily
> "analyse it wrong". this is a hot debate topic in the physics community.
> https://opendata.cern.ch/

Thanks for the pointer. I might poke my nose in. And yeah, raw data
without information about the rest of the experimental setup can be...
misleading. Meticulous data, collected with careful observation, is
worth its weight in anti-matter. At last look, that's about 62
trillion USD/gram?

> Re the TRIUMF photo, that's not my scope, I have a much newer one, but
> for some tasks, old scopes are better.
>
> The photo is taken in the walkway of the meson hall. Cyclotron is dead ahead.
> On the left side, attached to the He dewar is the brand new
> He compressor (makes liquid He: in Canada, we recycle!). Further left beyound the He compressor
> is the experimental hall with the cold neutron (0K cold, not just cold) machine
> and the muon beam lines for materials science experiments (MuSR). Outside
> of the picture (dead ahead behind the cyclotron) is the brand new state
> of the art e- accelerator. To the right (in a different building) is
> the unstable atom production (transmutation) machine (no, not lead to gold,
> we are not CERN!) and experiments that study these rare unstable atoms. Dead behind
> is a small cyclotron, it makes unstable atoms for medical use (radioactive tracers
> for medical imaging). This concludes your virtual tour of TRIUMF. You are welcome.
>
>
> K.O.

Thanks. Sometimes it's nice to hear what folks have been up to.