Nichi D'Amico - The amazing story of the COBRA and the MONGOOSE

Students and young researchers involved in science realise very soon that science is rather competitive. You should read this story and you will learn that when competition is healthy and respectful, it can be very productive, and can actually create a very passionate and friendly working context. During nearly twenty years of collaboration with Andrew Lyne and Dick Manchester (actually I have been collaborating with Dick for nearly thirty years!), we have jointly developed ambitious experiments at Parkes. We have trained many students and post-docs in the context of these experiments, and we are proud to see that almost all of them are now distinguished scientists. Andrew, Dick and myself, as leaders of the research groups which provided means and intellectual effort to these experiments, have always paid strong attention to keep the internal competition close to that magic threshold value which make it healthy and productive. We believe that we have been successful in this not-easy-job.

The story that you can read here is a testimony of the human passion and reciprocal estimate which occurred among the people involved in the most recent multibeam pulsar search experiments at Parkes, which ultimately led to the discovery of the highly relativistic binary pulsar, PSR 0737-3029, the first even known Double Pulsar. I wrote this story on the occasion of Andrew Lyne retirement meeting, held in Jodrell Bank on December the 19th, 2007. Actually, in the end I could not attend the meeting, so the story was performed by Duncan Lorimer and Michael Kramer. As far as I heard from Andrew, they performed very well!

Download the story in PDF format