The Experimentalist’s Obsession

From Physicists Nail Down the ‘Magic Number’ That Shapes the Universe, in Quanta:

And yet she and Müller have both set about making further improvements. The Berkeley team has switched to a new laser with a broader beam (allowing it to strike their cloud of cesium atoms more evenly), while the Paris team plans to replace their vacuum chamber, among other things.

What kind of person puts such a vast effort into such scant improvements? Guellati-Khélifa named three traits: “You have to be rigorous, passionate and honest with yourself.” Müller said in response to the same question, “I think it’s exciting because I love building shiny nice machines. And I love applying them to something important.” He noted that no one can single-handedly build a high-energy collider like Europe’s Large Hadron Collider. But by constructing an ultra-precise instrument rather than a super-energetic one, Müller said, “you can do measurements relevant to fundamental physics, but with three or four people.”

(Natalie on the beat, as usual.)