Joy of Science

Sometimes one is reminded of why doing science is really rather enjoyable...

I am currently visiting old friends, picking up undone work in an old collaboration.

And for once, everything just clicked together, in two short days we have put together new and old data, and extracted the near definitive results on a hard problem; a problem that has been patiently worked on for over a decade. Actually very close to two decades now.
Data, we worked on the actual data. Figured out actual data collection issues. Did science to 13 significant figures (I just counted)!

We then put together the predictive models published many years ago, pulling together multiple papers by several authors, put consistent notation together solving (most of) the geometry and projection issues, we think.
Then slammed the essential prediction into a written-on-the-fly fortran code (which actually compiled on the li'l laptop), integrated it with a graphics routine (smongo, of course, if you must ask) - and it works!
Numbers come out correct for "best guess" input parameters, right sign, right magnitude, right time scales, everything looks good. Even remembered to macro the graphics so we can reproduce the plots.

Damn it looks good.

So, tomorrow we'll have to beat it to death, check the secondary predictors now that we've solved for the parameters input; check we got the phase conventions correct (not critical, but matter quantitatively at the ~ 20% level) and generally look for what we might have overlooked.
Then someone can dig into the statistical weighting and look at proper confidence levels of the range of allowed solutions etc, be a good project for a grad student.
And we will have something we missed, which might not matter when checked, or might change things, or worse still, we won't find anything but some smart-arse grad student will after we publish...
but who cares! It worked, first time!
Enjoy the moment.

Oh, and then we get to argue about whether Scenario 2 is really favoured over Scenario 1 if you put in the right priors!? Should be good for a couple of workshops, eh? Not that it matters for the big picture, fortunately.

Yay.