Churchill’s expression was glorious Rodomontade, but in the end it is still nothing but rodomontade. Understanding the causes of the First World War did not help us to understand the different factors that were operating in 1939, and understanding the results of our isolationism when Hitler began strutting around did not help us avoid the opposite mistakes we made by waging “preventive” war in Vietnam and Iraq. “The past is a different country; they do things differently there,” and we learn nothing from them except that we cannot predict the future. This is true even more with science than with politics. At the end of every century, there is a spate of experts predicting what the new century will bring. But in 1900 no one predicted radio, much less television, or antibiotics or computers or MRI or CAT scans, or cyclotrons or trips to the moon, or even that man might fly. So I cannot pretend that the history written here will tell us what breakthroughs are in store for those working with the noble gases. That’s why they call it research; if you knew what the result of your experiment was going to be, there’d be no point in doing it. I thought I knew what the result of Ray Davis’s neutrino experiment was going to be, and so I thought there was no point in doing it. I was wrong, and glad to be, for it’s the surprises that drive us forward: Rutherford’s helium particles bouncing backwards, the xenon-129 peak poking up beyond where it ought to be, the argon-39 peak appearing where it oughtn’t to be at all, the electrical currents suddenly running wild through the heliumcooled mercury, et cetera and so forth and so on. What’s coming next? I have no idea and, no matter what they tell you, neither does anyone else. Which is what makes it all so exciting. Exactly fifty years after I first met the noble gases at Brookhaven in the summer of 1958, I turned off the mass spectrometer and retired.