When I was in college I worked for Professor Genady Shvets on meta materials research. My first task was to order everything needed for the experiment we were planning to do. The total bill came came close to $100k and he happily bought everything. When the instrumentation arrived i remember being scared to touch it because it was so expensive. After a couple of weeks and going over the user manual I finally said “screw it” and plugged everything in to see if I could get it to work.
After about a month I had integrated all the hardware, built samples to study, and written a GUI in Matlab to analyze data coming off the experiment. I was literally sleeping in the lab as I had a very busy schedule between physics classes and Air Force ROTC. Despite all that those were the happiest I’ve ever been in my entire life.
I’ve attached a paper we wrote for Physical Review Letters on my website www.factiii.com . Unfortunately a group from MIT published before us so we didn’t publish it. My group rewrote it and got it published a few months later, but I had left for the Air Force by then. @elonmusk if you could add the ability to attach PDF’s here that would be super cool. Btw, my platform is meant for science and research so isn’t a direct competitor.
