End of part two

All good things come to an end (some bad ones too) . Among the many duties of the organisers of a conference, the last one is to close the conference "officially", as well as all the peripheral activities... like this blog.

Since all conferences are as much a human adventure as a scientific one, there are a couple of thanks that I would like to address before switching the lights off.

First of all, thanks to the LHC, and all the 4 experiments, for having worked so hard to provide first results at the ICHEP conference. We hoped for these data since we thought of organising the conference in Paris, and we followed the ups and downs of the machine with mixed feelings. Would there be anything to show ? It turned out that all the collaborations worked very hard on the few months of data-taking, and obtained quite remarkable results (I am still impressed by the mu-mu spectra of ATLAS and CMS, and their nice resonance peaks).

Thanks also to the Tevatron, CDF and D0 for providing us with data that keep us wondering if something really new is just around the corner, trying to understand better the Bs-meson, pushing the limits on the Higgs boson... The race is not finished, and we should have rather interesting discussions across the pond very soon.

Thanks to all the technicians, secretaries, researchers (staff, post-docs, students) who helped in organising and running the conference. You cannot have a clear idea of how a conference of a thousand people will run... until it starts, with your fingers crossed, hoping for the best. Thanks to all of them, things ran very smoothly at each step (during the juggling of the parallel sessions, the ceremonial of the plenary talks, and even, yes, for the visit of N. Sarkozy).

Thanks to all my colleagues of this blog, who succeeded in giving a comprehensive (and sometimes very detailed) impression of ICHEP. I am quite convinced that people following the conference through the webcast and the website got a much more lively and interesting view of ICHEP thanks to this blog. Probably a lesson to remember for the next editions !

Thanks to the participants and speakers (which is approximately the same crew) for coming and taking part in this conference. Even though there were not many questions (in particular during the plenary talks), I caught many people at coffee breaks -- or during sessions -- in intense discussions not only about the food, the president, or the ICHEP bag, but also physics...

And finally, thanks to you, the readers of this blog, for your comments and suggestions all along this adventure. We hope that you enjoyed your time here. We definitely had a wonderful time sharing our two pence of knowledge with you...

"See" you in two years !