Why there's hope

First off, may I just say that yesterday was the fortieth anniversary of the first moon landing, and this is incredible for several reasons, all of which have already been said by commentators on the day in question.

I've been spending a fair amount of time over the past couple of years on a quest for my One True Nucleus to study. Since I've been determined to do it myself, I've been doing this with slowly increasing levels of competence as I learn what I'm actually looking for. (I've been afraid to ask for guidance too often lest someone accidentally give me explicit instructions to look at one particular nucleus. I'd like to get the whole science experience for my thesis--except for bitter, long-standing professional rivalries--so I wanted to do the whole shebang myself, from figuring out what I want to study to writing the proposal to doing the experiment and analysis.) This independent-mindedness leads to me trying to figure things out for myself... and sometimes I get them wrong.

Recently, I've been on another looking-for-my-One-True-Nucleus flurry of activity, and I found a couple of nuclei I liked for various reasons. Alas and alack, however, I found that what I had wanted to measure had already been published by other people! Today, upon talking with my advisor, I found out that I'd been conflating three concepts and if someone had measured one or two of these properties, that did not mean that the remaining properties were automatically determined.

Excitation energy--the energy difference between the excited state and the lower-energy state it drops down to
 
does not precisely determine (by way of some equation)
 
Excitation strength--the cross section for excitation to that level
 
which is not the same as
 
Gamma ray intensity--peak area divided by efficiency; this is what's represented by arrow thickness on level diagrams

Thus, the nuclei I was excited about and subsequently de-excited about are actually not as thoroughly determined as I had thought!