Bonner Prize Talk: PHENIX, Serendipity and Interferometry

The main portion of this talk will be devoted to the history of the PHENIX Experiment, highlighting the discoveries made in the initial years of RHIC operations, in particular the characterization of the near-perfect fluidity of quark-gluon plasma. Serendipity played a role, but not so much as did the extraordinary efforts of an entire collaboration to deploy and utilize a particularly complex detector to understand the properties of strongly-coupled matter. I will also use the opportunity of the Bonner Prize to discuss briefly the important role of serendipity in research.