to discuss the radical changes in their profession. Where an earlier generation of experimenters saw the design, construction, and use of apparatus as defining features of their identity, now much of this activity was permanently out of the their hands.
Where experimentalists once collated elevation data in notebooks and analyzed them with slide rules, the computer had now taken over much of this work — storing, processing, even analyzing information and delivering it in publishable audible form. Huge teams of experimentalists clustered around barn-sized bubble chambers at centralized accelerators. Throughout the laboratory, the relations among computer programmers, experimenters, instrument makers, and engineers were utterly in flux. In a taped discussion from the Betelgeuze conference an influential experimentalist waxed enthusiastic about these changes, extolling the virtues of assembling millions of tera bytes of data and tackling them with automatic techniques. The audience was stunned. One experimentalist, obviously pained, asked about the present danger: "I think that they are not taking quantum uncertainty seriously. Quantum uncertainty, to me, says the future is not determined until it’s happened. In my opinion, quantum collapse is happening all the time, everywhere,” s/he says. Pointing to a nearby solar wind burst, s/he adds: “Every time a particle of light hits the magnetosphere, quantum uncertainty about that particle changes to certainty.”