Do you know what it sounds like when you drop a million-dollar custom-built experimental apparatus from a hundred-ton crane? I do. It sounds like this: “Oh sh^!@#t……..” I was working in an experimental physics laboratory on a Department of Defense project. The military is known for figuratively throwing away millions of dollars. They do frown on literally throwing a million-dollar apparatus. I was operating a crane which had previously installed turrets on battleships. That must have been back in the day before drone strikes became all the rage.

Many years ago the U.S. Navy realized that giant floating artillery was also giant sinkable artillery. They scrapped the battleship fleet. At the same time our predecessors in this lab wanted to know what would happen inside of a particle accelerator if it was spinning. And they had friends at the Office of Naval Research. Voila! A custom-built underground lab, the size of a football field, with a battleship turret in the floor and seven-foot-thick leaded concrete walls. The crane was included because it was the only crane which could install battleship turrets. Fast forward about fifty years: the particle accelerator was long gone, but what to do with a hundred-ton battleship crane? How about swinging around ten-thousand-pound-concrete-blocks? For science! And also the Department of Defense. Even labs building sensitive gravity detectors have to pay the bills, right?

Of course, it wouldn’t have made sense to have tenured faculty operating this crane. Or even post-docs, or graduate students. They all had too much work. Plus, they’d already proved that the most valuable task for them was thinking. Who to train and license on operating a ninety-year-old crane? How about undergraduate research assistants? They’re basically free effort. Plus they don’t have any dependents, so a catastrophic malfunction is pretty low risk. And it’s a summer research program so they don’t have any deadlines or finals to worry about. That’s how I got my crane operator’s license. We started our experiment and ran into some problems. Originally the detector was thrown off by vibrations — like the kind caused by a hundred-ton crane swinging around. This was overcome with the world’s best motion isolation platform. It featured a bunch of fancy six-axis motion isolation hardware. About a dozen hundred-thousand-dollar custom shock absorbers damped any remaining vibrations. With the platform complete, we verified that the detector was now free of vibration noise. We spent a few weeks swinging big concrete blocks back and forth past the apparatus. This established that our detector worked when it was standing stock-still on the ground. Time for phase two! The proposal specifications called for it to be mounted in a very specific chassis. For some reason, the dimensions of the chassis matched the inside of a Humvee and an MH-60 Seahawk helicopter. But our detector was too heavy for us to lift into the chassis by hand. Oh my. What to do.

I climbed into the cab of the crane. My partner on the ground double-checked all the straps to make sure the detector was properly secured to the hook. He looked around to make sure no-one but us was under the crane, just in case it chose this moment to collapse. He donned his hard hat as a nod to the risk incurred by every button-push on our old dinosaur. If the crane — or any part of it — had actually fallen, his hard hat would have been the only survivor. Then up, up, up came the signal! And indeed up we went! For about a quarter of a second. That expensive motion-isolation platform? It was bolted into the concrete floor with foot-long bolts. Something about how our lab was located on the San Andreas fault line, blah blah blah. As soon as we maxed out the shocks the crane jerked to a halt. Reflexively I jammed the “down” button and the platform slammed back to the ground. I thought I was done. Certainly with the undergraduate research program, probably with my advisor (it was his lab, after all) and maybe with the whole physics department. Sure, I wasn’t the one responsible for checking the load. But I had pushed the button. I’ve never seen anyone’s face look quite like my advisor’s did at that moment. Or for quite a while afterward. I think it froze in that expression for about ten minutes. If I had to label it, it would be “crippling dismay.”

He looked a lot like this (public domain: painting from 1893) And then he collected himself. Sure, a couple of twenty-year-old kids had potentially just destroyed three years of work. Our mistake had also put future funding in jeopardy. Research sponsors tend to frown on the destruction of million-dollar equipment packages. But there wasn’t any way to go back in time and undo it. He could only go forward. And he taught me some of the most important lessons of my college education. Lesson 1: you can’t undo the past, but you can understand it. My advisor immediately conducted a post-mortem. Sure, it was impossible to undo our mistake. And we’d have to deal with the outcomes later. But the first item of business was making sure we wouldn’t be doomed to repeat it. He began by listing out what had gone right. Even in a disaster such as this there is room for gratitude. For one, he was extremely grateful that nobody had gotten hurt or killed. You don’t usually see the headline “Crane accident: no injuries.” He was also grateful that the damage was minimal. We may have destroyed the motion isolator — that remained to be seen. But at least the detector turned back on when he flipped the switch! Then came the take-aways. How could we avoid repeating our mistake? We created a written checklist for crane operations which included more thorough readiness checks. Going forward there would always be two people checking before the crane was fired up. One of the people signing off had to be a postdoc or faculty. We also didn’t limit our scope to this situation. We reviewed other dangerous operations in the lab and created safety protocols around all of them. Lesson 2: now is the new normal. Having addressed the immediate concern, he set about getting the research back on track. We spent a few days re-testing the motion isolator. The detector was very, very sensitive so the slightest change to the environment could invalidate all the data we’d collected so far. Such slight changes included applying 5,000 lbs of lifting force to the shock absorbers, and dropping the detector. We established that the shocks were now adding noise to the experiment. Sadly they didn’t make it through our little adventure completely unscathed. But we found out it was always the same noise. We were able to create a baseline — the new normal. This understanding of the change in our situation allowed us to proceed and still use all of our existing data. Lesson 3: you keep going. And we moved on. My advisor didn’t keep beating us up about the mistake we made. In fact, he never did. He knew that we immediately understood the gravity of our error. He also made sure that we participated in every step to recover from it. This showed us the full the impact of our mistake. It taught us about correcting for experimental errors, and incident recovery. It also taught us how to keep going no matter what has come before. I’m no longer a practicing physics researcher. My crane operating qualification has lapsed. Most days go by without me using a lot of the technical skills that my summer as an undergraduate researcher gave me. The lasting lesson, the one that still helps me the most to this day, was this lesson in resilience. Bad things happen. You can’t undo them. Sometimes the effects are lasting. But you can take time to collect yourself, establish a new baseline, adapt your new experiences against it, and keep doing great things.