“Soup, salad, or Higgs?”
A snowstorm hit the Chicago area on February 13, before the start of the DOE/NSF agency review at Fermilab of the US ATLAS and US CMS collaborations, the US contributions to two of the Large Hadron Collider experiments. A number of people were trying to fly in–both reviewers and reviewees–and we got started late that evening with only some of the people attending. Our dinner plans also fell through, so at the suggestion of DOE reviewer Pepin Carolan, we went to a restaurant called Riva’s in nearby Naperville with a few people willing to brave the weather: Carolan and Saul Gonzalez of DOE, Joel Butler of US CMS, and myself.
At Riva’s, we encountered a huge panoramic painting of the Chicago skyline, done by a local artist, and several monitor screens displaying stock information and business news. And then we encountered Dave the Waiter. It was pretty quiet in the restaurant, and Dave asked us what we were doing out on that stormy night. We told him we were at Fermilab for a review, and that got him going at high energy.
He asked whether Fermilab would discover the Higgs. He asked about new results from the lab with Higgs indications at around 160 GeV. He knew about CERN and the LHC. We told him we needed him on one of our reviews. He was better informed than some of our colleagues.
Dave the Waiter made our day, given all the weather problems and all our difficulties getting the review started.
Michael Tuts, Nevis Labs, Columbia University, DZero experiment at Fermilab
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