The Orange Bible
X-ray Data Booklet
The little orange booklet is probably one of the most successful pieces of scientific documentation ever written.
I realised it when every visiting scientist who came to the beamline picked it up to look up absorption edges. There are so many numbers packed into that tiny booklet that almost nobody remembers more than a handful of them. Every experiment seemed to involve someone reaching for it. I've never seen a pristine copy at a beamline, not a one. The most useful documents have broken spines, folded pages, coffee stains and handwritten notes, and some have no cover left at all.
I eventually persuaded Al Thompson to sign my own copy. Al was the lead author, and we worked together briefly at Beamline 4.2.2 in Berkeley in the early 2000s, back when ALS still printed boxes of them and reading things made of paper was still quite common.
Scientists would constantly try to take the beamline copy home with them but we'd redirect them to the stack in the ALS lobby where visitors could pick one up. In hindsight it was a brilliant piece of outreach and indirect advertising. Hundreds upon hundreds of little orange ambassadors spread around the world, an X-ray information diaspora. Each one ending up who knows where.
The last revision I’ve ever seen was printed in 2011. Some ALS conference booths still hand them out if you're lucky. I don't know of another scientific reference that has survived this long, remained this relevant and become this well loved.
There is something deeply satisfying about flicking through the tiny booklet. When I started building X-ref, I wasn't trying to replace the orange bible, that would be impossible. What I wanted was to make the modern version, the information available wherever you happened to be (it’s designed to work offline). Cleaner, faster than the book and as delightful as digital can be, you know, something genuinely useful. Version 1 will be available in the next week or two on iPhone. I would have preferred to give it away for free and I tried to find a synchrotron or company willing to sponsor it, but I couldn't make that work. Instead I've priced it as low as I can while still being able to keep improving it. Hopefully version 2 will be the real leap forward but more about that another time.
In the meantime, I'd love to know how you got your orange book and where it is now. Other than the X-rays themselves, it is probably the one common thread amongst all of us beamline folks.
